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a re-telling ofGiselle, and it's one of the lovely quiet images tells you some- most dazzling pictures of its ilk-it thing about his culture; imagine an ex- even made it into this year's highbrow quisite romantic fantasy directed b:y, New Directors/New Films series at the say, Hal Needham. In Ching's first Museum of Modern Art. The image film, Duel to the Death, the line be- that sticks with you is of swirling silk- tween real and supernatural is poeti- a beautiful ghost's long sleeve spinning cally blurred. Ching's swordsmen defy like a hypno-wheel as she vanishes into gravity, somersaulting through the air thin air. The movie is filled with lyrical and leaping 20 feet onto balconies, sleight-of-hand. At the command of an while his spirits can be too corporeal for evil queen (played Chinese opera style comfort. The villains in Duel are a team by a man), a glamorous ghost girl of ninjas who seem neither human nor (Wong Tsu Hsien) seduces wandering poltergeist. In one scene, a warrior con- knights and then stands back as the fronts a colossal, 30-foot ninja behe- queen's endless, serpentine tongue moth, which suddenly splits into a hurtles through the forest, plunges into score of normal-size killers, flying out the unfortunate lover's mouth, and from the mass like bees. Elsewhere, sucks out his vital fluids. (The dire the ninjas float silently overhead on warning, \"Shut your mouth or the kites, beautiful and otherworldly, tongue will get in!\" is probably the seemingly remote from anything that most vertiginous line in any ghost could ever harm you. movie, ever.) E ven in more pedestrian Hong Kong Her troth pledged to a horrible lord spook flicks there's something re- of hell, the ghost-girl falls in love with freshingly casual about the interaction a hapless young tax collector (Leslie Cheung's Ling Choi Siu) who joins between the living and the idea. En- forces with the Taoist hermit to storm the gates of the underworld. There, in ergy exists on many different planes; a furious climax, the earthlings bran- dish sutras and hurl sacred spikes at the you never know if the space beside you black hordes of demon soldiers, so that the girl can be reincarnated and re- is full of restless spirits waiting to be J turned to the world of daylight. reincarnated, or if a ghost might not The daylight scenes do look a little come after you for something you did Zu: Warriors of the Magic Mountain. cheesy, but when it's dark, the blue wrong in a previous lifetime. Ghosts, in gels work their magic: the sky turns vi- olet, the moonlight orange, and the short, are a fact of life, as much a part treated so unfairly by the living that mist drifts in; the red eyes of wolves stand out among the black and twisted of the atmosphere as radio waves. Slop- even ghosts will step in and help him branches. Above the hero, who makes his way through the forest to a haunted pier Chinese'ghost movies contain one out. It's a cynical body of work; one temple, the ghost who loves him floats from tree to tree, guarding his path; or two miscellaneous spirits who just film even ends with him appearing to later, we glimpse the corpses of those menacing wolves hanging from tree happen by, usually in human form. forgive-and then beating the hell out branches-she has silently slain them. Unlike the genre's more zany speci- And that's not counting the ones who of-his unfaithful wife, but in Encoun- mens (romps with titles like Spooky Kookies or Mr. Vampire), A Chinese show up in nightmares. ters of the Spooky Kind, a sorceror turns Ghost Story strikes just the right bal- ance of horror and farce. In a scene wor- According to an ancient Chinese al- Hung into a monkey, and Hung not thy of Sheridan, the ghost's harpy sisters and their lethal queen arrive to manac, dreaming about a ghost is a sign only pulverizes his able opponent, he plan the heroine's imminent wedding, and she is forced to hide the young that you're going to get rich. This lopes, jabs, swings from beams, and mortal in her bath amid the floating lil- ies, periodically dipping her head be- bodes well for Sarno Hung, whose chatters like a chimpanzee in heat. neath the water to blow air into his ghost vehicles (among them Encoun- Next to our own worldly, arrogant lungs. The director, Ching Siu-Yung, is a ters of the Spooky Kind and The Dead bloodsuckers, however, the Chinese martial arts instructor who staged the and the Deadly) begin with his character vampire is something of a stiff. He has fight scenes for Tsui Hark's Zu: War- riors of the Magic Mountain and Peking bei~g torn to shreds by a demon and a white face, yellow fangs, and long tal- Opera Blues. That he can also concoct then waking up in a sweat-to find a ons-the Manchu version of Max ghost at his bedside. But no, it's only a Schreck in Nosferatu, with all the char- friend playing a prank on him. The isma of a famished rat. His most inter- Chinese have a weakness for pranks esting trait is that he hops instead of and false scares, and mortals often pre- walks, his arms stretched out so that in tend to be ghosts. Which is, of course, motion he looks like a sleepwalking the surest invitation for a real one to kangaroo. This vampire won't bend show up. over to bite your neck; he'll float down Mixing slapstick with startling bru- to your jugular, his body remaining tality, Hung's ghost movies focus on rigid as his feet rise off the ground. He petty public officials, greedy landlords, can levitate at will, you see, which and dishonest tradesmen, all of whom compensates somewhat for those hatch elaborate schemes to cheat, mincing little steps he's forced to take. cuckold, or kill one another. The only If you get stuck in a room with him, innocent is Hung, who is forever be- however, you have a surprising number trayed by those he trusts most-his of options; a lot of the fun in Mr. Vam- wife, his best friend, his master. He's pire /, /I and //1 comes from charting the so
Taoist ghost fighter Richard Ng in Mr. Vampire Part III. Eastern variations on Christian weap- Set in an ancient China ravaged by poised to descend on mankind; to kill ons like crucifixes, holy water, and factions, the mesmerizing (and often the blood Monster, it is left to the stu- hawthorn stakes. Holding your breath, laughable) Zu: Warriors of the Magic dents to achieve what their teachers for instance, will render you invisible Mountain (1983) is Hark's attempt to could not-the fusion of their sacred to our ghost. Breath held, you should raise the sword-and-sorcery genre from swords (and, by extension, of heaven quickly look around the room for a tal- its slough of cynical individualism. and earth), even if this means forfeiting .isman, preferably a piece of the sutra Fleeing the bloody chaos, a typical their identities or sacrificing them- copied in red ink on a strip of yellow wide-eyed student (Yuen Biao) falls in selves. When a sacrifice is made, a god- rice paper. This, affixed to the ghost's with a typical loner swordsman (Adam dess-her head filling the screen- forehead, will stop him dead in his Cheung) and the pair does battle with whines her approval, assuring that tracks. Then you can say a prayer and formidable demons called the Evil nothing in the climax may be misinter- spike him. Sticky rice will burn his Ones, who dispatch blood crows to in- preted. \"The young really is [sic] tak- flesh or keep him in his coffin, but vade men's souls. The two meet up ing over the world!\" marvels an older watch out for unscrupulous shopkee- with another student and master (a warnor. pers who mix in ordinary rice to save Buddhist), and while the two teachers money. Torches are also handy...,.s the are possessed with like abilities, nei- Although much less ingratiating sheriff in Night ofthe Living Dead might ther will join forces with the other and than Hark's recent Peking Opera Blues, put it, these ghouls go up pretty good. compromise his own school of thought. Zu: Warriors overreaches so spectacu- In short order, both are ravaged by the larly that you can't help admiring it- Yet it must be admitted that Hong Evil Ones, and the hero's teacher turns the movie is like a superhero comic Kong ghost movies can grow te- ' into a snapping, crackling, and pop- book for 12-year-old Communists, a dious quickly-even the best have a ping devil, hurling insults and light- daft blend of martial arts, Wagner, and whiff of the assembly line. You don't ning bolts in equal measure. Mao. The year Ching Siu-Tung staged have to suffer the fake religiosity of a the fights for Zu: Warriors, he brought Spielberg film, but you don't get the The film has until now been rather to Duel to the Death the same absurdist surges ofemotion, either. Some excep- pulpy and romantic, especially in teas- view of war. The title refers to the tions are the rambunctious epics of ing scenes in an all-female strong- match-up of a Chinese and Japanese Tsui Hark, who brings a touch of the hold-a cave ruled by a mock-frigid champion, but their climactic fight didactic and allegorical to an arena that countess who has a flashing temper and proves meaningless-all along, they (Hong Kong being Hong Kong, at least seductive powers of healing. But in its have been the pawns of corrupt lords. until 1997) has been traditionally shal- finale, Zu: Warriors turns coldly sym- Yet they clash anyway, hacking off low and apolitical. bolic and prescriptive. The Evil Ones, limbs and spraying each other with freed from their mountain, stand their blood, and the picture ends with 51
by Paul Fonorotf Anita Mui and Leslie Cheung in Rouge. The movie's point of view is com- T he single most important caveat plex, conflicted: the young modems for a novice aficionado of HK ROUGE are comparatively callow and de-cul- movies may be this: they can turized, but the Thirties characters are never, ever be understood in isolation. M ost current Hong Kong mov- seen partly as victims of their rich tra- The history of the HK film industry is, ies, even some of the very dition, particularly in its social mani- to a large extent, the history of its tan- best, unfurl in an urban festations. They suffer in a society that gled interrelationships with the indus- dream world, a glossy, international- still incorporates the best of the ancient tries of Taiwan and the mainland. ized, pop-fantasy universe, and there past but that brutally restricts individ- These cultural and linguistic crosscur- can be something a little desperate ual behavior; the weight of all that cul- rents have been proliferating right from about all this bustling \"modernity.\" ture can be suffocating. the start. The brand-new Rouge is different, a richly textured, almost contemplative Rouge is watchfully directed by From the 1920s to the 1950s, there ghost story/romance that offers an au- Kwan Kam Pang, who, with photog- was a continuous two-way flow oftalent thentic whiff of the uncanny. It's really rapher Bill Wong, favors edgy, slow between HK and Shanghai. HK's first a movie about the ways in which the camera moves that parcel out infor- major studio, China Sun (Minxin), re- past haunts the present in a city like mation, with sensuous dark reds and located to Shanghai in 1926 and later history-heavy Hong Kong. deep shadows in the \"past\" episodes merged with other studios to form the and bright, open, shadowless compo- United Photoplay Service (Lianhua), In 1934 Hong Kong, aspiring Can- sitions in the \"present\" scenes. As the one of the largest of the pre-war tonese opera singer turned prostitute, storyline shifts back and forth between Chinese film studios. Fleur (Anita Mui), sports with her the decades, associations and implica- \"special friend,\" Chan (Leslie tions pile up. After the outbreak of the Sino-Jap- Cheung, Tse-Ket in A Better Tomor- anese War in 1937, the Shanghai film row), the languid, opium-puffing son The title is a typical multi-purpose industry was dealt a huge blow and ofa good family. Both Mui and Cheung reference point: the use ofmakeup sets shut down for many months. Several are pop stars in real life, and they're a prostitutes apart from respectable prominent directors and actors fled to touching couple when they press their women, of course, but it's also what al- HK, where they made movies that perfect noses together and warble tra- lows the sojourning ghost to pass for were considered to be of higher quality ditional ditties. human, and it leads directly to the (so- than the usual local product. cially suspect) opera stage and (in a In 1987, the long-dead Fleur appears startling final sequence) to the tawdry In the meantime, the Shanghai film as a spirit to a pair of comparatively cal- supernatural fantasies of movies. industry had recovered with a venge- low yuppie journalists (Leung Man Chi Th~re are no special effects in Rouge at ance, but since many big stars had gone and Emily Chu), spoiled urbanites who all--except for the cheesy fakes that to Chungking and other places in Chi- are, in effect, typical \"modem\" Hong confront the characters on a visit to a na's interior, the studios began looking Kong movie characters. And it's ob- movie set, a pop fantasy of spookiness for talent from HK. One of the colony's vious that Fleur scares these compla- that pales before the ghostliness of real biggest stars, Chen Yunshang, was re- cent people, not only because she's cruited in 1939 and, in a case reminis- dead but also because of all the other life. cent of Vivien Leigh's importation to dead stuff she represents. -D.C. Hollywood, quickly became the hot- test ticket in town. She made three an angry, irresolute tableau. sequential Hong Kong ghost movie. movies in 1939, and they ranked first, On the ghost front, too, there are re- The mournful finale is foreshadowed second, and fourth in the year's box- when a ghost accepts an apple from a office tally. cent signs that the genre is coming of young mortal she has befriended. age. Crazy Spirit, although lamely di- Since ghosts cannot eat uncooked Following the defeat of the Japanese rected, offers a modem couple neither food, she takes a bite and stares sorrow- in 1945, an unstable political and eco- responsible nor committed enough to fully as dark red blood wells slowly out nomic situation in Shanghai saw an- hold onto a ghost child that has floared of her mouth. It is as if, for the first other wave of talent move south to HK. into its midst; even with the powers of time, the Hong Kong ghost movie has Prices were steady in the British col- a Taoist, the child is lost. Much more tasted pain. ~ ony, but inflation was rampant in disturbing is Kwan Kam Pang's Rouge Shanghai. The cost of a movie maga- (1987), a rare example ofan adult, con- zine, for example, rose from 20 cents in October 1948 to $600,000 in May 1949-serious inflation! With Shanghai's liberation, a num- ber of left-wing filmmakers and stars returned to the Mainland (many of whom were later persecuted during the Cultural Revolution). And with the na- tionalization of Shanghai's private stu- dios in the early 1950s (as well as many other factors), another wave of movie people made the trip in the opposite di- 52
Orientation rection, to HK. Chen Yusheng, Hong Kong star ofthe Thirties, in The Angel. Before 1950, Shanghai was looked the dominant language of HK movies. prominence of Cantonese films during upon as the Hollywood of the East, the What is surprising is that Mandarin-di- their occupation of the colony. With capital of the Chinese film industry. alect cinema not only flourished during the shutting down of all studios and the HK, the second largest center for certain periods but at one point domi- banning of American and British mov- Chinese-language movies, was re- nated the local scene. ies, Shanghai-produced Mandarin garded as a poor cousin, much as Hol- films and Japanese imports dominated lywood filmmakers viewed the \"quota The Mandarin films produced by the boxoffice. For instance , the quickies\" produced in England. But transplanted Shanghai directors in the Queen's Theatre, a first-run house spe- Cantonese-dialect pictures had a large late Thirties were looked upon as a re- cializing in Hollywood films , was re- marketplace, including Southeast Asia freshing change to the \"Seven-day- named the Meiji in 1942 and thereafter and American Chinatowns, and there wonders\" (low-budget quickies) prev- showed Toho productions exclusively. were always Shanghai filmmakers who alent at the time. But Mandarin movies wanted a piece of that lucrative pie. were few in number and made no in- After V-J Day, Cantonese movies re- That first Cantonese talking movie, roads on the Cantonese market. The sumed production and quickly re- however, The Plat,inum Dragon, was Japanese were the first to topple the gained their dominance. It took longer produced not in HK but in Shanghai, by a film company that later relocated its entire operations to the colony. Travel restrictions between HK and the Mainland in the Fifties coincided with the growth of the film-industry in Taiwan. Thereafter, the flow of traffic involved Taipei and HK, with HK filmmakers looking to Taiwan for new stars and Taipei looking to ilK direc- tors and technicians to help build its fledgling cinema. By the late Sixties, the Taiwanese invasion of HK was in full swing, with Taiwan-produced Mandarin movies dominating the col- ony's screens. A decade later, the flow had become a mere trickle, and the Eighties saw a gradual reopening of the Mainland marketplace and the reemergence of co-productions with Mainland film companies. This has further compli- cated the relationship between HK filmmakers and Taiwan, since stars, di- rectors, and other personnel working on the Mainland find their films black- listed in Taiwan. As long as the trend towards Mainland co-productions con- tinues, however, and with more and more leading stars taking part, it is doubtful that the Taiwan authorities can keep up with their blacklists much longer. Cantonese is the Chinese dialect spoken by over 90 percent of the peopJe in HK, though just across the border in China as well as in Taiwan, Mandarin enjoys the status of \"official dialect. \" With Cantonese so prevalent, then, it is not surprising that it has been 53
for the Shanghai film industry to re- cover from the ravages of war, and a large contingent of Mandarin filmmak- ers moved south. Add to this a political situation in Shanghai in which film- makers with left-wing tendencies found it difficult to survive, and you have the birth in HK of an important Mandarin-dialect cinema. These movies didn't have to rely on the HK market, since the Mainland was still open. And even after Shang- hai's liberation in 1949, the HK Man- darin movie continued to flourish. Often viewed as prestige pictures, with larger budgets and more technical pol- ish than most of their Cantonese coun- terparts, they were able to hold their own at the boxoffice, even though many HK residents didn't understand the dialect and the use of subtitles did not become commonplace until the early 1960s. Cantonese films reached a produc- tion peak of over 200 features a year from 1960 to 1963, with Mandarin films declining from about 70 to 3S annually. But the trend reversed itself, and by 1969 the number of Cantonese and Mandarin films were nearly equal with about 70 each. Between 1971 and 1973, over 460 Mandarin movies were produced in HK, and only two Can- tonese films! Not only that, but throughout the late Sixties and early Seventies, Mandarin imports from Taiwan frequently did better at the boxoffice than the home product. This is one of the most interesting puzzles of HK film history: why such a precipitous, if temporary, decline in Cantonese film production? Why the . sudden popularity of movies in a dia- lect foreign to most residents? Film' scholar I.C. Jarvie, writing as the Man- Silver Ught, the first Hong Kong movie magazine (1.926-7). darin tide was already ebbing, offered world . . . Because of this reasoning I here have preferred local product to this Iess-than-prescient explanation in am inclined to doubt that there will be foreign imports (with a few notable ex- his book, Window on HK:A Sociological any sustained revival of the Cantonese ceptions, particularly during World Study ofthe HK Film Industry and its Au- 'movie.\" As it happened, Cantonese War II, when production ground to a dience (UHK Centre of Asian Studies, movies made a quick recovery, and by halt, and in the late 1960s, when Tai- 1977): \"Movies are part and parcel of 1977 once again ruled the film scene. wan imports became the rage). But this the modernization process in HK. Mandarin movie production was dead is hardly to suggest that HK audiences (Cantonese) movies are a kind ofstand- by 1980, and in the Eighties there is have rejected Hollywood-style film- pat towards the modern world; they only one dialect cinema in HK-Can- making, for local filmmakers have use local culture and personalities, tonese. With few exceptions, movies never been bashful about \"borrowing\" folk-stories, popular operas... Man- are now shot non-sync, though the ac- from foreign pictures. darin movies, on the other hand, stem tors speak their lines in Cantonese dur- The very first Cantonese-language from the emerging national conscious- ing production. The finished products film, The Platinum Dragon (1931), was ness; tend to be produced in sophisti- are released in a dubbed Cantonese based on a Cantonese opera of the cated urban surroundings .. . by version in HK and a dubbed Mandarin same name. But the opera itself was culturally cosmopolitan Chinese; and version in Taiwan and Southeast Asia. based on the 1925 Paramount film The to treat stories and use the movie me- Grand Duchess and the Waiter, starring Edium in a way that comes to some kind ver since HK movies found their Adolfe Menjou. Oddball examples like voice in the early 1930s, audiences this abound throughout the colony's of terms with progress and the modern S4
.I l!. u' .... These \"remakes\" are almost always THE LIBRARY SERIES cruder and cheaper than the originals, Cantonese film hit Her Tender Love (1969). so it's a bit of a puzzle-why are these • Dancing on the Edge of Success with thinly Chinesified ad aptations so much dancer/choreographer Margaret Jenkins movie history. Despite his current sta- more popular? In pre-liberation Shang- tus as a despicable racial stereotype, for hai, as elsewhere in Asia, Chinese films • Women by Women at San Francisco 's famed instance, Charlie Chan was once an ex- barely survived the Hollywood com- Galeria de la Raza. Latino women speak ceedingly popular figure in Asian petition. Only HK audiences consist- about thei r art movie markets. An actor named Xu ently prefer domestic productions- Xinyuan, noted for his resemblance to except as sources of poachable raw ma- • How to Market a Body of Art-guidelines Warner Oland, starred in a series of terial. from the studio to the market place Charlie Chan films in Shanghai in the late Thirties, and in several more made F oreign observers, perhaps Ameri- • Interviews with Artist Program I-Survival in HK in the late Forties. cans especially, have to make an ef- Research Laboratories mechanical per- fort to remember that not everything formances, Lucy Lippard discussing cultural Other swipes are equally overt: Some they see (or can't find) in HK movies responsibility plus 5 more Like it Hot was carbon copied as Every has been added or taken out because Cloud Has a Silver Lining (1960), Dog the moviemakers wanted it that way. • Interviews with Artists Program II-three Day Afternoon as People's Hero (1987), minority artists reveal their genesis and City Heat as All the Wrong Clues (1984), There is very little political content motivations The Thomas Crown Affair as Easy Money Interviews with Artists Program /II-from (1987), Police Academy as Naughty performance art to dollmaking to the Church Cadets on Patrol (1986)-the list could of the Subgenius be pages long. Enlightening· Entertaining· Economical VHS • Beta· Video 8 I.V. Studios 985 Regal Rd . Berkeley, CA 94708 Call or write for catalog (415) 841-4466 From Painting by John King 55
in current HK films, for instance. You Gangs. World War II Cantonese film survives rarely come across a realistic look at the today. Most were melted down during workings of the neo-colonial govern- its premiere at the 1988 HK Interna- the war, to extract their silver base. ment, or a probe of HK's relationship tional Film Festival. It was hailed by The Central Film Archives in Beijing with Britain (or The People's Republic critics, but the censors disagreed. has some Mandarin films produced in of China), or even a sly attempt at top- They ordered over 20 cuts, including HK in the late Thirties and early For- ical satire directed at recognizable pub- several for \"gang-related language\" ties, but on the other hand, a few more lic figures. But it would be a mistake to that was in fact bogus, an invention of post-war films are lost each year. One infer that all filmmakers here are the screenwriter. Later, when I re- example: the 1955 Mandarin classic staunchly apolitical. HK producers viewed Gangs on HK TV, my reference Between Fire and Water was shown at claim the public isn' t interested in pol- to the \"20 cuts\" was itself censored, this year's HK Film Festival, but in a itics, but the specter of 1997 has cre- snipped from the videotape before air- dubbed Cantonese version. An original ated a keen interest in the future, and time. language print could no longer be 10- debates are raging in every available cated-even though a Mandarin print public forum-except the movies. The censors never stated their had been screened by the Festival as reasons for trimming Gangs, but it is recently as 1979. The HK government has broad but widely assumed here that they found vaguely defined powers to censor films the picture so compelling as to promote Film journals and other publications on political grounds, and the Televi- rather than discourage \"Triad\" activ- are also disappearing, crucial for re- sion and Entertainment Licensing Au- ity. Fortunately, their snips don't di- search when so many of the films them- thority has been keeping an eagle eye minish the power of this bold film, its selves have vanished. HK's first movie on local production since the 1950s. bitter realism a direct refutation of ro- magazine was published in 1926, and Until 1987, however, few challenged mantic gangster pictures like A Better over the past six decades more than 100 its legal right to do so. But an internal Tomorrow-which the censors, oddly, different movie periodicals have ap- report leaked to the press last year re- seem to have no trouble passing. peared here-a potential treasure trove vealed not only that the Authority was for students of the industry. But no li- acting illegally, bu t that officials were U K's film heritage is on the verge of brary has bothered to collect these fully aware of this slight oversight. The extinction-something to con- magazines, and today it is impossible to release of the report caused a furor, and sider if you're interested in learning find complete sets of such leading pre- a bluntly designated Political Censor- and seeing a bit more. Act fast, because war publications as Artland, Screen ship Bill was hurriedly prepared, so the movies may not be around much Monthly, or The South China Movietone. that the government could keep on longer. doing what it had been doing aU along. HK desperately needs a film archive Several top producers have formed It is sometimes said that not one pre- or library, to collect and restore its The HK Film Association, to fight the crumbling movies. There are qualified bill, but it will almost certainly become personnel available to run such an or- law this year. ganization. The problem is dearth of funding. Neither the government nor The filmmakers contend that the bill film moguls like Shaw Brothers' Run has been calculated to placate Beijing Run Shaw or Golden Harvest's Ray- by stifling criticism of the regime across mond Chow have shown any concrete the border. Government spokesmen support for the idea. insist that few movies have been banned on political grounds over the It's nice to know that some Western- past 16 years. What they fail to realize ers are finally taking a serious look at is that filmmakers and film distributors the cinema of HK. In the meantime, have been diligently censoring them- however, the movies themselves con- selves. When the Taiwanese film The tinue to decay. You may already be too Last Winter in Peking, critical of the Cultural Revolution, was banned after late. ® playing for one day in the early 1980s, few distributors were willing to bring Special thanks to the following for other politically sensitive films to HK. their advice and/or assistance in the The HK International Film Festival preparation of this midsection: was not given official permission .to screen Taiwanese films until 1987. Sandy Adams (Golden Harvest, LA); And on the home front, no domestic Ian Baruma; Russell Cawthorne (Golden movies have dealt with the 1997 issue, Harvest, HK); S.C. Dacy; Dennis Dort; or with other China-related issues, Paul Fonoro!!; Bill Krohn (Cahiers du with any kind of boldness or depth. Cinema, Hollywood); Jim Lau; Richard Myers and Bill Connolly (Martial Arts Politics aside, the HK censors keep Movie Associates,); David Overbey and a sharp lookout for material they deem Maureen O'Donnell (Festival of Festi- detrimental to morals. Recently, a vals, Toronto); Robert Tam (Gordon's starkly realistic melodrama about teen- Films,); Anne Thompson; David Ting age crime, Gangs, one of the strongest (Oriental Films, Alhambra); Matthew HK pictures of the last few years, had Tse (Ocean Video, Studio City); Elsa Wong and Stella To (Cinema City Ltd., HK); Caros Yau (Sil-Meteropole Orga- nization, HK). 56
The17thNew Directors/NelVFilms Series by Annond White , ' y o u r film is greater than any ~rrl11 prize we could give it,\" Alain Tanner said to Michel Khleifi 'Nldding in Galilee. Lyrical self-regard. a few days before awarding Khleifi's Wed- sentimentality or taking the easy way out of dialogues between Sullivan, a journalist ding in Galilee the Grand Prize at the San through exile, Khleifi shows the irony of (Bill Paterson), and an extraterrestrial ma- Sebastian Film Festival. But the film's un- his people's deeply rooted customs (ex- chine called Friendship (Tilda Swinton) heralded American Premiere at New Dir- quisitely lighted by Walther van den who is misdirected to the war zone while ectorslNew Films shows our own film cul- Ende) in transience. Being a man of two headed for M.LT The Mideast question ture's typical imperviousness to the way cultures, Khleifi applies a European- is just one of the topics they discuss, al- art and politics should meet. Wedding in trained eye to Mideast feelings. He moves ways returning to the essential subject Galilee looks at a village of Palestinians us with the same kind of poignance vaunt- of mutual understanding between races, living under Zionist military dominance ed in Chekhov. sexes, species. Lamenting nihilism, with lyrical self-regard. Khleifi affirms the film is like a Rod Serling parable on Palestinian culture with a free imagina- The Mukhtar's wedding day plans humanitarianism and surprisingly win- tion. There's a feeling of liberty in watch- rouse dissension among the family, and some coming from theorists like Wollen ing a non-Western story unfold and a Khleifi dollies in on his characters at the and his exec. producer Colin MacCabe. greater sense of fairness than what the precise moment ofcultural tension: every- Friendship's gradual radicalization sug- New York Times reviewer cavilled about one is forced to reexamine their personal gests the new empathy of effete intellec- when protesting the peripheral position of politics. Khleifi gives this quandary a sex- tuals. Tilda Swinton plays this self-de- the film's Israeli characters. ual metaphor: The bridegroom's impo- scribed \"simulation\" with a rectitude as tence symbolizes a greater problem than lovely as the young Deborah Kerr's and a Khleifi works to balance his-and the negotiation of political land mines by witty speech about her fellow feeling for a our-sensitivity to life during Occupa- Arabs and Jews. Although one protest typewriter that recalls Rosemary Harris at tion. His self-reflexive tale of a Mukhtar speech gets repeated by rote (\"No cele- her shrewdest.. (Ali M. EI Akili) who seeks to follow eth- bration without dignity, no dignity under nic tradition despite Israeli indifference to the heel of the enemy\"), this is a remark- In Nicos Papatakis' The Photograph, an invitation to his son's wedding, eluci- able film because of its personal sense of nostalgia for home is perverted by the dates a very modem circumstance: the quiet panic and tender pride. harshness of alienation and political exile. struggle for self-definition in the face of Two Greek men living in Paris during disparagement. It could be any ghetto or In three other NDINF programs, ele- the early Seventies suffer the dislocation shtet! story, but Khleifi puts Palestinians ments that Khleifi combines to such im- that Khleifi's characters fear. Papatakis ob- at the center of our consciousness for the portant effect are singled out: Peter Wol- serves their pain in a switched-around good reason that very few filmmakers in len's Friendship's Death dramatizes the country mouse/city mouse fable. Each touch with the West have ever bothered. Black September of 1970 through a series The recent revelation of military brutality against the Palestinians has turned the tide of sympathy, making the film's perspec- tive especially timely. Khleifi understands how tenuous cul- tural tradition can seem to disheartened individuals. The Mukhtar's wish for his son (\"I want you to learn my story by heart ... What I fear most for you is myself.\") personalizes the confusion of a traditional- ist in a modem world. It's also the finest complex of ethnic and patriotic ambiva- lence I know of on film. Without cheap 57
man exploits the other's sense of brother- Marshall Gaddis in lost's Bell Diamond. neys AJton Maddox and C. Vemon Ma- hood, longing for the secure heritage they son's point that minorities have to press for left behind. There's a good Viscontian diers during a patrol in New Guinea. \"You justice in a pervasively racist society. But monologue in which the younger man can't escape heaven's justice, you're Choy and Tajima don't proceed like law- ponders his deception and a great se- guilty,\" Okuzaki tells each of the old men yers or joumalists. They trail Vincent quence wherein Papatakis cuts from the he harasses. Hara and crew look on as Chin's mother around the country drum- men's hostility to their caring for each oth- Okuzaki verbally and physically attacks ming money and support for an appeals er. The erotic contrast deepens the point, the senile or enfeebled men who admit trial that, as a foregone conclusion, mocks which Papatakis turns into a homopolitical him into their homes. It takes naivete or Chin's death. version of Suspicion and then simplifies willful ignorance to mistake this opportun- into a literal You-can ' t-go-home-again ism for a confrontation with the aesthetics Mixing TV shows, news footage and explanation. He shows a fineness of feel- of the documentary. Hara shows no gift for primary source interviews, Choy and Ta- ing but not of mind. faces, emotions, or settings. He never gets jima aim at a wide, encompassing, Go- a clear report on what actually happened to dardian summation of Eighties civil rights Bell Diamond by Jon Jost also engages a Japan's 36th regiment and he fails to con- backlash. The image of an auto demoli- milieu neglected by most filmmakers. Jost front Okuzaki's obvious insanity. This tion with sledgehammers, showing unem- shares Khleifi's belief in this other world's red-eyed travelling executioner with sal- ployed Detroiters striking back at the Jap- worthiness and makes a similar mix ofdoc- low skin might be a fascinating fictional anese auto industry, is too good to pass up, umentary and poetic observation. Jost's figure like the subject of Imamura's pow- but a trite point compared to what we real- use of nonpro actors proves his integrity erful but repellent Vengeance Is Mine, but ly want to know. Why did the judge in the too well-almost speciously-because documentary filmmakers must concretize case ignore eyewitness testimony and is- surrounding this desert of inarticulate, their observations. Structuring informa- sue a light sentence? When Choy and Ta- tion is important-it takes work. If this jima let the murderers speak for them- tight faces is some of the finest pictorial film proves anything it's that documentary selves, their blithe statements are not representations of the working-class filmmakers are accountable for their pres- especially damning or surprising-it's the Midwest imaginable-cloud-filled skies, ence and are participants in the situations simple evidence of the nature of racial di- cyclone fences, desolate factories, frame they organize. Okuzaki's madness and vision in the U.S. Chin's murder might houses, generators, pipelines, oil tanks. cruelty are sins these filmmakers must not have been racist at all-just vicious- The ribbon-tied plot, about an unem- share. yet the judgment certainly seems unfair. ployed vet, Jeff (Marshall Gaddis), whose But Choy and Tajima don't pursue it. wife, Cathy (Sarah Wyss), walks out on In Who Killed Vincent Chin ? directors Neither the judge nor the county prosecu- him and returns, is Hollywood fake. Jost Christine Choy and Renee Tajima show tor is interviewed. Who Killed Vincent retreats from a rigorous open narrative to a the racist atmosphere in which two white Chin? is full of sorrow and disgust yet note of uplift that is convincing only in its Detroit men killed a Chinese autoworker somehow it fails to look at the plain truth. probable banality. Despite the film' s and the court's subsequent outrageous grainy texture, Jost's eye is as sophisticat- sentence: probation and a fine. To have Call Me Madam is another of F ranc;;oise ed as Khleifi's. He inserts old silent docu- understood these facts thoroughly might Romand's Believe It or Not real life es- mentary film during two women's infor- have made a great, all-too-pertinent film says. She's amused by the situation of a mal art discussion to make us aware of how for this era-an illustration ofactivist attor- art portrays man in his environment. A packing-up scene between Jeffand Cathy and a confrontation with a veteran's coun- selor (Anne Kolesar) are sharp on attitude and language. Like Khleifi , Jost discerns emotions that conventional film practice misses. AJI this through the intrepid pur- suit of a different world and an alternate point of view. T hese films show reality as artists see it. Most of the NDINF documentary filmmakers never went that far. Cane Toads easily surpassed the others through writer-director Mark Lewis' bemused ap- proach to \"an ecological disaster, the wholesale, inadvertent invasion of more frogs than Pharaoh shook his stick at.\" But ifhe doesn' t take Australia's reptilian baby boom seriously, why should we? The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On, Kazuo Hara's execution of a Shohei Imamura project has the latter's usual in- terest in perversity. It follows Kenzo Oku- zaki's vigilante investigation of his military superiors who, 40 years ago, mayor may not have cannibalized low-ranking sol- 58
60-year-old transsexual whose wife stays SUMMER WORKSHOPS on as a companion in their little cottage, complete with turret. Ovida Delect was The Leading Summer School for Film and Video Professionals born Jean-Pierre Voides-the inverted name is a tip-off to the bad poetry she One- Week Workshops writes and recites at the beach dressed in a wedding gown. Romand loves this image Producers Master Class Corporate Scriptwriting and constantly returns to it. She thinks she FilmlTV Producers Forum Introduction to Video Production can get away with cute freakiness. Her Complete Producer (lTVA) Acting for Directors luckiest moments (catching the cliches of Scene Directing Workshop a wife's forgetfulness and a husband's- Directors Master Class Comedy Directors Workshop Ovida's-routine chivalry) edges us into Scriptwriting Workshops Editing the Feature Film disbelief. Romand's empathy with her Screenwriters Master Class Casting for Actors & Directors subject is suspect. Ovida insists that the Film Adaptation Workshop words \"marriage,\" \"father,\" and \"effemi- nate\" don't apply to her. Fair enough: nei- Comedy Writers Workshop Asst. Dir.lProd. Mgr. Workshop ther \"Documentary,\" nor \"Drama\" apply to Romand's P.T. Barnum cinema. The Workshop offers 50 one- and two-week professional classes each Summer taught by the industry's leading directors, producers, cinematographers , camera Keeping Love ALive-a concert and in- formal interview with octogenarian song- operators, actors, and technicians - many who have won Oscars. stress Elisabeth Welch-only means to Courses run June 1 through August 15, 1988 entertain, but directors Stephen Garrett and David Robinson overestimate how Write or call for your free copy of our 40-page catalogue long we can tolerate a quavering voice, even in a demonstration of how \"a song is The nternational a story put to melody.\" Mter awhile Welch's emotional distance from her ma- Fi 1m & Television terial gets old. What's exciting is her re- called career: she introduced the Charles- VIORKSHOPS ton on Broadway in 1923 and was cast as \"the colored girl\" in dozens of shows like Rockport, Maine 04856 (207) 236-8581 George White's Running Wild, Blackbirds of1928, and Dark Doings. Welch says \"I These programs supported by ARRIFLEX . KODAK & Panavision - Additional support from Cinema learned early to be proud of my Mrican, Products . RaSCO . TiHen. OSRAM . Lowel . Matthews. Sachtler. O·Connor . and Panther [American] Indian, and Scots blood,\" but Garrett and Robinson show no interest in ~MAGICIMAGE FILMBOOKS is proud to announce learning how Welch rationalized a stereo- the second book in the Ackerman Archives Series on the typed career. Knowing why Welch ac- reconstruction of Lost Silent Films cepted white musical standards and, like CRITICAL ACCLAIM her peers, latched onto ersatz ethnic songs LON CHANEY'S \"A BUND BARGAIN, a book about LONDON AFTER like \"I Got Porgy\" would have given this LOST HORROR ptfTt of the [tucinating and mort mysterious MIDNIGHT film substance. MELODRAMA lif. and dTt of LON CHA N EY-a fa,- By Philip J. Riley A BLIND BARGAIN cin4ting tlddition to m4gical movie IOT~. \" Lilyan Sievernich's John Huston and The legendary lost Vam- the DubLiners is a promo for the Huston (Goldrryn 1922) VINCENT PRICE pire film reconstructed using legend, which has now reached epidemic over 300 photographs and ti- proportions-there's even a sanctimo- By Philip J. Riley \"A BUN D BARGAIN i, a lovingly tles published by Cornwall nious comparison between the well-read \\ reconstructed lIt\"Tsion of the film on paper. Books is available in very li- old craftsman and a gnarled, dead, but still • Forward by Robert Bloch Since the film no longer exiru it's the next mited supply by sending standing tree. This last testament, filmed • Introduction by Patsy Ruth best thing to seeing it.\" $35.00 plus $2.50 postage and on the set of The Dead, shows Huston's handling. patience with dense actors who forget to Miller MARTIN SCORSESE pass the celery on cue but it gives no in- • Lost Films of Lon Chaney by (New Jersey residents add 6 per- sight into who really directed the second \"Anoth\" lo,t Chaney' Wonderful! Th. cent sales tax.) unit sequence that some reviewers claim Jon Mirsalis Ackennan Archives pun.ide dn other trea- brings The Dead to a moving climax. Is a • Over 300 photographs- sure fOT posterity.\" little useful information too much to ex- many never published before pect of a documentary, or is Huston's RAY BRADBURY \"greatness\" to be accepted without ques- tion? • Complete Shooting Script • Pressbook, Cut Scenes, T he presentation of Dominique Derud- dere's Love Is a Dog From HeLL just Production notes about makes up for all the nonfiction non- • Biographical notes on Direc- sense. The NDINF showing should res- tor Wallace Worsley by Wal- lace Worsley, Jr. • Detailed look at Lon Chaney's make-up box as it exists today Film reconstruction using all available stills and original title copy. Send $29.95 plus $2.50 for shipping and handling. Order both books for $50.00 (include $5.00 for shipping and handling.) NOT SOLD IN STORES-AVAILABLE BY DIRECT MAIL ONLY SEND ORDER TO: MAGICIMAGE FILMBOOKS, P.O. BOX 128 • BRIGANTINE, N.J. 08203
cue this adaptation of Charles Bukowski Love Is a Dog From Hell. Kaige, which has some of the most fanat- stories from the neglect of West Coast crit- Miller's genre films has, lately, curdled ically precise constructions and visual pat- ics who ignored its American premiere last their meaning. It's like watching ethics terns since Fritz Lang and Eisenstein. fall. A three-part vision of one man's de- deteriorate in time-lapse photography. The story of a Chinese platoon aghast at velopment from innocence to disillusion- But Tung moves so fast he returns us to a military ritual impresses less than Kaige's ment to oblivion, this film shows Derud- state of innocent pleasure-he directs at coordination of green shirts and blue dere's gift for the fantastic. He gives the speed of lightness. shorts, the line-up of red stars on helmets, young Harry Vos' most mundane desires a and the way he pans action from left to fairytale splendor and horror. Rooted in This isn't crude jolts for illiterates, it's a right. There's even less formalist logic in the universal, irresistible terms of pop brave new kineticism, such as inspires a Jean-Pierre Denis' Field ofHonor, an ex- movies and records, this is a powerful new generation of rap percussionists and cruciating war-is-hell flick set during the study of romantic melancholy. That comic book artists to rediscover the worth Franco-Prussian Wa[ Denis trades on art makes it a far more original film than Blue of a sound or a visual trope. The sound- history lectures-not so that paintings Velvet, which too often was art school track is one of the wittiest things here, come to life but so that cinema stands still. Grand Guignol. Deruddere intuits the from songs to the mice-like squeals of a Steve Jodrell, director of Shame, has the connection between Bukowski's vulgarity cellar full of zombies. I regret that the cunning to make this feminist version of and Cocteau's classicism, showing both finale of serpentine tongues, metamor- Yojimbo zip by as fast as its cycle mama the pure and unholy sides of love. phosing organisms, and rippling bolts of heroine (Deborra-Lee Fumess, a non- silk is not as simple and poetic as the rays ham Judith Ivey) gets across the screen. Deruddere's was the best film in of light drowning out darkness in Legend, The idea is to raise consciousness by a low NDINF, but Ching Siu-Tung's A Chi- but that film investigated Western fanta- blow to our yahoo instincts. Maybe this nese Ghost Story was the series' jamboree. sies and myths in a conventional way. A seems radical in Australia but here it's not Tung combines genre parodies and daz- Chinese Ghost Story offers dynamic sur- much more than crude. zling craft to make the kind of supreme realism. The trouble with accelerated film movie-movie that once only Hollywood craft is when it cheapens experience as in Sunday Pranks restates the paralysis of could do. Take note: the hysterical kineti- the films of Adrian Lyne or a RoboCop. cism of martial arts movies, that has made Tung can also whip up beauty: a kiss he imagination in Eastern bloc filmmakers. impact mostly in rap and hip-hop subcul- films under petal-filled water is wondrous This time Robert GlInski directs little Pol- tures, here proves to be the wildest thing because it wisely makes bliss brief. ish kids play-acting their parents totalitar- going. The last movie to raise audience ianism. He seems to have confused Lord expectation to such a plane of hallucina- 'ore problematic NDINF narratives of the Flies with Bugsy Malone. Atom tion and then surpass those expectations Mincluded The Big Parade by Chen was Brian De Palma's The Fury. A Chi- Egoyan confuses video and film in Family nese Ghost Story has sequences equally Uttle Dorrit. marvelous. And a quarter of the way through its pell-mell plot, about a tax col- lector's romance with a ghost and the cou- ple's rescue by a Taoist swordsman, there occurs an image out of dreams: the ghost and warrior chase each other in mid-air through tree-tops, past a nighttime rain- bow. Tung unleashes these visual epi- phanies almost casually, as if there was no effort to performing a miracle, just a wish. (As these sights dance across your eye- balls, another vision of Industrial Light and Magic'S stock plummeting hits the back of your head.) Obviously this Chinese mastery of widescreen thrills proves some kind ofcul- tural revolution. Pushing the pedal on De Palma and Spielberg and shaking the cricks out of Ridley Scott's sumptuous Legend mise en scene, Tung and wizards have restored the rules of dexterity, imagi- nation, and genius that are sometimes hid- den in the sophistication of recent Spiel- berg, De Palma and Scott. A Chinese Ghost Story has flying martial arts battles that are impeccably staged, edited with la- ser cuts that don't miss a significant ges- ture or a coherent match. At first it all seems too fast to read, just gestalt. But this is the tempo-the mood--of new pop op- era. The pace of Walter Hill's and George 60
Viewing. His premise uses the cathode explores Dickens to describe the trajec- AVAILABLE ray to split the nuclear family. But hjs n~ tory of fate. ON VIDEO tion ofdomestic crisis is TV-the kind you switch channels on. Le Jupon Rouge The last three hours are the best part of One of the best independent films w~ve seen (Manuela's Loves) by Genevieve Le- Little Dorrit. That's when the light-toned, febvre was the final insult of NDINF busier style fills in the narrative gaps of the all year. L.A. Weekly fiction . It's the worst feminjst tract this darker, morbid first half, and when Pick- side of Jill Clayburgh, with a motto (\"So ering's little dormouse heroine becomes a A FILM BY RICK SCHMIDT many women go mad, it takes very little portrait of the megalomania of virtue, and sometimes\") that made one audience when Dickens' social observations go con- E ERA D member double over in laughter. Even tinental and get more tumultuous and ITIE n with stars like Alida Valli and Marie-Chris- striking. Had Sammy & Rosie Get Laid For lovers of weird movies, independent direc- tine Barrault, Lefebvre finds no glory or taken advantage of length and expanded tor Rick Schmidt is the king. uplift, or sensuality, only morose dia- narrative this way, it might have been the logue: \"I must die a fool in this poetry of great exposition Hanif Kureishi envi- Robert W. Butler devastation.\" Lefebvre resorts to using sioned. Edzard, like Dickens, gives inci- KANSAS CITY STAR Nazism as a symbol for sexual repres- dents time to cook, boil, and then- sion-a true sign that film creativity has steaming-resonate. EMERALD CITIES features Ed Nylund as an reached a dead end. A project this bourgeois in origin can't alcoholic, part-time Santa who runs a cafe in L ittle Do\"it by Christine Edzard ought pretend radical politics (although the st~ to open somewhere even though its ry's contrasts between social strata is more Death Valley with his actress (laughter (Caro- (smooth running) six hour length limits its honest and telling than what we get from appeal to Dickensians and insomniacs. most filmmakers). Yet Edzard is not of the lyn Zaremba). When the daughter runs off to The fact is, it's a real movie-not a pr~ Masterpiece Theater mindset; there's San Francisco with a punk (Ted Falconi of tracted miniseries like Berlin Alexander- bravura audacity in her fractured opus. platz or Heimat. It's strongest pleasures re- She rejects the Merchanrllvory don' t-you- FLIPPER), Ed follows. He encounters a politi- late directly to what's kept this medium wish-you-were-there? model in which close to our hearts-the imaginative pull only the upper-class matters and the Eng- cian who wants the country to be one big of Narrative, practiced in distinctly mod- lish are so flatteringly lighted they look em form. Edzard approaches storytelljng healthy. Edzard's work has radical ante- National Park with himself as head park ranger as art. She connects to Dickens the way cedents: Rossellini's The Rise ofLouis XIV Griffith once did and today only Spielberg and Techine's The Bronte Sisters similarly (Lowell Darling), an ex-con in a Martian mask does-with a natural interest in exploring stylized the past through visual artifice. narrative development and as a touch- Edzard wants to trigger an art conscious- (Dick Richardson), punk rock bands FLIPPER stone of the storytelling heritage. Movies ness with a reflection of the past that also are primarily images but not only that: the hints at the metaphysical. This may aU be and THE MUTANTS, politicians and priests rags-t~riches-t~rags-t~riches structure of mere borrowing (I'm not sure whether Little Dorrit takes viewers through a vari- Edzard's intentions are always avant- justifying limited nuclear war as manifested on ety of incidents, picking up philosophical garde or just primitively faithful to Dick- and sociological meanings along the way. ens), but her methods are consistent and TV, including street interviews (by Wille Boy challenging. She doesn't take the easy Edzard divides Dickens in two. First to way out by imitating David Lean and be- Walker) about the death of Santa Claus. visualize meanings and codify existence. coming a literary Richard Attenborough. As Anhur Clennam (Derek Jacobi) seeks Although the more bizarre components make his inheritance and later his humanity Asking an audience to make a narrative though service to the servant girl, Amy cohere in their heads is an unorthodox im- this film excellent late night fare, with its Dorrit. Next, Amy (Sarah Pickering), goes pulse that suggests real seriousness. It re- through the female equivalent of this spir- spects and preserves, through narrative allusions to mass media and the health of the itual yet very worldly passage. Edzard cre- mathematics, certain of Dickens' genius nation, it's much more than just-a freak show. ates a riveting flux of psychology and em~ insights about man, society, and destiny, tion. This isn't nearly as magical as it becoming as radical as great art always is. Or is it? Jo Comino seemed in the long narrative Dickens-de- There were self-satisfied chuckJes in the rived films Orphans ofthe Storm and The audience at Alec Guinness' first appear- CITY LIMITS (LONDON) Color Purple (or even 1900) but it's smart. ance as Dorrie's father. This mjssed the Edzard knows about the appeal of movies film's point. Guinness is thrilling here, but EMERALD CITIES is now available for rental to relay reality with insight. So she tells Edzard's intelle«tual n~nonsense manner and/or sale at the following video stores: Dickens' story twice-in two distinct doesn't showcase the tics of British acting manhers. Form is thus celebrated and and culture. The choice of beady-eyed •••• PALMER'S VIDEO (Berkeley) •••• scrutinized and Dickens' masterly, self- Derek Jacobi as the lead is determinedly •••• FRONT ROW VIDEO (Berkeley) •••• conscious, nearly abstract joke of plotting anti-romantic. Little Dorrit's look (phot~ ••••••• CAPTAIN VIDEO (S.F.) ••••••• soars like music. The first crescendo, be- graphed by Bruno de Keyser) captures the •••• • •• VIDEOPHILE (Seattle) ••••••• fore intermission, brings Anhur and Amy ossification of English society and tradi- •••••••• VIDEOACTIVE (L.A.) •••••••• together. The machination is obvious but tion. What's usually enshrined in myth is its emotional power is ambiguous. Edzard here-given an aesthete's view-seen as Or purchase your VHS/BETA (please specify) death. Edzard resuscitates Dickens' ideas cassette for $49.95, plus $2.00 per copy for but keeps the past in its place. ~ shipping/handling . Please send money order payable to :[,.,.-.._......:. C ....../.................~....,.P..':. :...._...,..; 61
Lee's The Man with the Three Coffins. by Amos Vogel tion), the Forum operates five theaters orable South Korean works by Lee around the clock for 12 days , screening Chang-Ho. Since over 40 features can be seen over 100 features, with many of the at any one time at Berlin's Inter- filmmakers present as invited guests. It The earlier work, The Jester's Man- national Film Festival, one needs is the Forum rather than the Compe- ifesto (1983), is a delirious, sexy me- to eliminate entire categories, retro- tition that makes Berlin unique. lange of slapstick, violent colors, spectives , and national cinemas to do startling music, sleek modernisms, and justice to even one major field. Con- It is curious that the most original social comment. It centers on the limp- centrating on the current international films at Berlin dealt directly, though ing Dong-Chi\\, a Luftmensch in pres- independent scene, one can verify its poetically, with the paradoxes and un- ent-day Seoul, and his friendship with vitality and failures, its thematic and certain boundaries between reality and a taxi driver, with whose help he \"ab- formal concerns, at the festival's Inter- illusion; ambiguity and unpredictabil- ducts\" a pretty \"student\" (actually a national Forum ofYoung Cinema. One ity reign supreme. Equally significant prostitute), only to be beaten up by of the two majorcomponents of the fes- is the geographical spread of these her. Their hare-brained adventures tival (the other being the Competi- works. In acts of almost unconscious underscore the absurdities and contra- cultural imperialism, we tend to equate dictions of Korean urban culture and sophistication with the West; how wrong we are can be seen in two mem- Continued on page 66 62
It:~>;~.II by Harlan Jacobson minder. The zoo and the aquarium lay ference to dope out those two whirling darkly just north of the lights , lights, dervishes of drives let loose onscreen You must stop reading Isherwood, stop lights , and as yo u drift through the this yea r by the heretofore leas t likely Lookingfor Cabaret. The mentaLity is the February chill to a rendezvous with a of suspects, the quiet Ca nadi ans? same but that Berlin is gone. It is still the whisky, yo ur heart brakes as this sen- Where else does a friend take you to a greatest city in the worLd. It is whatever tence races through yo ur mind: \" If it side street lined with bars, point to four you want it to be ,you can find whatever happened right now , where wouLd you adjacent joints , and ask, \" You wa nt you want to find . .. .Ooooh, I just want hide?\" to snuggLe right up to the WaLL. It makes leather, lace, lice , or labia?\" In that or- me feeL so safe. -David Overbey More succinctly, the place is nuts , the compression insistent. There's a der. Where else on your way to a T here's a night glow to West Ber- craziness in Berlin that if you're at all screening do yo u nearly get trampled to lin , a fusion of more than the crazy fleshes it wide out into the open. death by a runaway demonstration to cafe neon and fluorescence of How you go crazy , of course, tells the \" Free the Soviet Hare Krishnas!!!\"? the center of the rebuilt city at Kurfur- story, and in' that regard your fellow stendamm, where Budapester Strasse travelers in film criticism or commerce The sheer mass of the festival , and Kurfiirstenstrasse broach each become as complicit as either Shriners hundreds offilms organized in six main other and create a plaza. The plaza is or shrinks at conventions on their final categories-Competition, Panorama, wide and dark, and at its center, sur- day together. All come to peer through Forum, Market, Children's, and Ret- rounded by a wall of lights , stands the the cinema prism , some come for each rospective-defies m as tery . Like life, Gedachtniskirche, the church bombed other, and I chased a shadow and was yo u pick your spots. Access to the films mostly into oblivion by the Allies, who has been orchestrated to a fault . Switch left a ruin of a tower that serves as a re- pursued by ghosts. It is Berlin. for a second to another medium: surely, it is the Germans who have Where else wou ld a film festival, as taught better hoteliers all over Europe the 38th Berlinale did , spontaneously to fold the first leaf of toilet paper into generate a Sex and Death press con- a perfectly creased point (\"Mein Gott, Lotte, how can we promote you when 63
yo u are our best toilet paper folder ?\"). Alexsandr Askoldov's Commissar, and vie t system. When this film opens in Which leads first to a se nse of depri- completely forgot to pick up a transla- New York in June, it will be the media vation and depression when all subse- tion headset. I speak no Ru ss ian , read splash of the week. quent leave s reveal themsel ves as no German. Neither was necessary, as hopelessly square and, second and a subsequent English-subtitled view- It is 1922, the Red and White armies most embarrassing, leads to folding all ing substantiated. The film is a mas- are fighting, and a Red troop led by its those subsequent square leaves into lit- terpiece of montage, yielding itself female commissar on horseback enters tle pointy ones yourself. It is possible, with absolutely stunning clarity in a a walled and boarded-up town. When therefore , for a film festi va l to run visual grammar worthy of Eisenstein they find a soldier who \"deserted for a splendidly, on time to the millisecond , and Dovzhenko that not only carries woman's bed,\" the commissar \"deliv- and still leave yo u mi ss ing the point. the story line, adapted by Askoldov ers him to Revolutionary justice\" and from a 1934 story by Vasily Grossman, orders him shot. His body crumples; F resh from the night fli ght, I shot but also the conflict of the central char- jugs smash on the cobblestones. In the straight away into the sc reening of acter and the political assault on the So- next scene, the commissar (Nonna Morjukova), who looks like she lives on a diet of potatoes and mud, is preg- nant. To have her baby, she is billeted with a poor Jewish famil y led by a tinker (Rolan Bykov) and his wife Samuel French's (Raisa Neaschkovskaya), who support six children in a shtetl. The subsequent T HEATRE&FILM dialectic between the two women ex- BOOKSHOPS tends well beyond the question of what PLAYS and BOOKS on the constitutes the role of a woman in the dawning age-mother or soldier (draped in a babushka and a dress and carrying her baby, the commissar looks MOTION PICTURE INDUSTRY like an ox in a tutu}--to a deeper po- litical analysis. sendfor a copy ofour The Soviet failure to deliver a nur-. Fll..MBOOK CATALOGUE containing turing, upholstered famil y life, as the Business ofFilm • Directories • Screenwriting self-sufficient Jews demon strate , is Screenplays • Directing • Cinematography rooted, in Askoldov's film , in the battle Biographies & Studies ofDirectors • Editing slogan ideology that replaced Lenin's Lighting • Animation • Special Effects nobler one. Askoldov's brilliance is, in Makeup • Acting • more delirious montage, to read his charac- ter's mind, essentially to lament , Order by \"What could one expect from a gen- PHONE: eration whose emotional interior stopped with singing the 'Interna- (800) 8-ACT NOW (US) tionale' and whose interpretation ofthe (800) 7-ACT NOW (Calif) human condition is expressible only in metaphors to cannons and canteens MAIL: and horses in or out of formation?\" It is less that Askoldov's Jews are 7623 Sunset Blvd. Hollywood, California Fiddler echoes than that, in 1967 Soviet cinema, they were Jews at all, and Yid- 90046' dish-speaking ones at that. Commissar VISA • Me • AMEX also has a sequence that presages the Holocaust, and then draws the link be- tween doctrinaire thinking and boys' When in Los Angeles visit our bully educations. Hitler, Stalin-what 2 locations the hell. And it is less that his commis- 7623 Sunset Blvd. sar learns at the feet of a housewife Hollywood,California 90046 about gender politics (i. e. , how to take out a sewing machine and zip shmattes (213) 876-0570 into Mother Russia's maternity dress) which in 1987 don't wash in the West, Mon.- Fri.l 0:00-6:00 Sat. 11 :00-5:00 11963 Ventura Blvd than that their fragile moments to- Studio City, California 91604 gether ultimately limn the material and moral collapse of an idealized society (818) 762-0535 into a modern monstrosity. No wonder the Brezhnev Sovs buried Askoldov. Mon. - Fri. 11:00-l0:00 Gorbachev must be looking over his Sat. 11 :00-5:00 Sun.l2:00-5:00 shoulder at Ligachev on this one. 64
Commissar has an excruciating his- and mythology-it's fl ying uteri time. CHlaCHlaCHHlaaaa aaa tory. Completed in 1967, the film was Burroughs, by sharp contrast, has used shelved for 20 yea rs, until the Moscow the letters of a New York school- g premNo.lewr.lng... film festival last summer. Askoldov teacher, Maryse Holder, who wanted also was shelved; now 57, he has been to fuck all of Mexico, with the appetite aa allowed to make two TV documentaries and entree of a man , and not get killed since Commissar, that the Russian pub- for it. She was, however, and Bur- a the films of lic has yet to see. The lates t Soviet fruit roughs talks Holder's letters (later col- ofglasnost, following Berlin's awarding lected and edited as Give Sorrow a .aa The film annual that has it all: of the Golden Bear last yea r to Gleb Words) into her own camera like Joan 433 films including US releases of Panfilov's Theme and the debut in Rivers with a body below the neck and Cannes of Tenghiz Abouladje's Re- an education above it. I11III foreign films pentance, Commissar took a special jury prize in Berlin, which extended its F or the West Germans, Percy Adlon W . CineBook's own reviews and penchant for Red chic by giving the stole the show with his English lan- Golden Bear this yea r to China and guage Out ofRosenheim, released here ~ five-star ratings Zhang Yimou's Red Sorghum. in the U. S. in April as Bagdad Cafe. Ad- > '- • plot synopses Ion has taken an interesting tack in his Y imou's film flashes back to the doping out of America by finding in its - • cast and credits Twenties to focus on the narrator's cultural desert-peopled with polecats , • parental recommendations grandmother, then a yo ung peasant and cartoon characters-the perfect woman, who's been sold by her father refuge for a German refugee , Marianne • cassette availability to a wealthy 50-year-old leper for a don- Sagebrecht, the Jabba the Hut house- • people to watch key. With her lovable, boys-will-be- wife in Sugarbaby. • obituaries boys chariot bearer who first disposes of • all the major US awards a highway bandit, then the leper, and Out of Rosenheim is American melt- • over 200 photographs finally marries her, she builds a suc- ing pot mythology the way Jim Jar- cessful vineyard in which her fellow musch might reinvent it, but it's not so • full refund if peasant workers pee in the wine (to far from Frank Capra's You Can't Take returned give it an edge) and share in the profits . It With You, either. Adlon's film stands within 30 days opposite, howeve r, to the Taviani's An okay joke, peeing in 'the wine, Good Morning, Babylon , in which the • $19.95 but the film means to phrase a period of ephemeralness of the American exper- about a dozen years in which those who ience-the sets of D .W. Griffith vs. premiere made the best efforts to wrench China the stone and glass of an Italian price from feudalism ended in being skinned church-makes returning to Italy to alive by the Japanese. The title's red die preferable to living here. We are , cornfield is a mys tery zone where life starting to be understood , not merely forces lurk and which, in red filter at symbolized. CineBooks the film 's end, is bathed in the political light of the red future. There is precious little to say about © 1988 Werner Herzog's Cobra Verde other T he Canadians really provided the than this: The man who went bananas Please send me the premiere edition of The 1988 most fun in Berlin. Having fooled in the making of Fitzcarraldo has be- Motion Picture Annual covering films of 1987. everyone for years about being the rel- come madder still. Two-plus hours of I enclose $19.95 ($24.95 outside US) plus $2.25 ative who lives in the attic and talks to watching Klaus Kinski trying to get his postage and handling (in IL add 7%sales tax). himself, English Canada, it turns out, feet to stay on the ground (or was this has put aside ranting about Canadian shot upside down and inverted?) while D Enclosed is my check/money order nationalism and started screwing itself reveling in the 19th century Brazilian OR charge my D VISA D MasterCard D AmEx to death . The most cerebral of the Ca- slave trade (only to recant in the last 30 nadian films was Family Viewing, in seconds of the film!) has convinced me # _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Exp. Date _ _ which director Atom Egoyan has fash- that at last someone has found a way to ioned a three-dimensional video, TV, film National Geographic on acid. Signature _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ and film matrix about sex, death, and Which is how some reviews get writ- Name _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ___ the Canadian way of both. Eye chew- ten , you say. ing gum, however, was Jackie Bur- Address _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ roughs' A Winter Tan, a considerable Perhaps the heightened reality of improvement upon the vulva verite Berlin came to a point when, ducking City State _ _ Zip _ _ __ genre Rosa von Praunheim works in , out of back-to-back screenings of a pair most notabl y his Red Love ofa fe w years of Agnes Varda films, Jane B . by Agnes Please allow six to eight weeks for delivery. back. V. and Kung-Fu Master, to go to East Berlin, I crossed over at Checkpoint Call toll-free 800-541-5701 In that one, von Praunheim followed Charlie-and ran smack into Varda. a certifiable 50-year-old nut-case haus- Caught. I fumfered that I was on my CineBooks, Inc., P.O. Box 1407, Dept. FCC58 frau around with a wobbly camera as way to Oranienburgstrasse, where on a 990 Grove Street, Evanston, Illinois 60204 she pours out a lava of sexual insight winter night in 1938, Kristallnacht made us all Jews. The truth about Ber- lin is that there is nowhere to hide. $ 65
Created bf1eLD VOGEL and complete. Matsumoto is Japan's eenwriting Continued from page 62 best-known theoretician and propa- SYD gandist of experimental cinema, and so L\"tTTAehhaecHehleeebgr~iabeladlneud·OtEahfxroyathrmS~Cm.fiiSlemCr RinEdEuNstPryL\"A-Y end in phantasmagorical tragedy in the filmic citations of Dr. Caligari. which nightmare and reality blend. Marienbad, and Jung appear as inevi- '11 of screenwriting The film is based on a former prisoner's table. • Master the ski s ht-after novel of pimps and prostitutes, in a de- ·th \"the most tseoaucgher m. the veloping urban civilization which ex- Equally compelling, Fulvio Wetzl's ploits women, then cruelly discards unexpectedly macabre first feature, WI •• them. Rorret (Italy, 1987), comments ironi- screenw\"tmg dReporter cally on cinema and its myths in its world'!.-HoIlYWoO Lee's major work , however, is his wanderings through Hollywood genres 1987 The Man with the Three Coffins from comedy to melodrama. A sym- ert guidance (soon to be released in the U.S.), ar- pathetic, psychopathic theater owner • Receive the etxrpa~salastealyaobuler guably the most original film at Berlin. (whose plush apartment is conveni- you need to Entranced and mystified for literally its ently situated behind the screen) picks ~~~T:rf~ It~~a~~vacy ofyour entire two-hour length, one is caught in out his female victims by observing the hypnotic grip of a radically oblique through a peephole in the curtain their uscown home. credit style and narrative unpredictability. fearful reactions to horror films-the • ChOose to et:yr~ur screenplay. Based on a surrealist short story related only kind of film he shows. Key scenes as you crea to Korea's traumatic division, it fuses from Psycho, Dial M for Murder, et al. uncertain worlds of perception and are lovingly re-created by the film- f syd Field's imagination. It intertwines the convo- maker. Since the lonely theater own- luted story of a young man traveling er's only interlocutors are film • Become one a ents, like . \" wi th his wife's ashes to what may be her characters, his conversations with his hometown; the deflections posed by a intended victims are studded with the successful stud \"The ThOrnblrds; mysterious dying old man on a quixotic stilted cliches of Hollywood Fifties dia- journey to his birthplace in North Ko- logue. The climax offers an unex- ACnanrma eHnamClulltvoenr,· Ph~'I~~'u\"Mthaesmk;\" rea; and his even more inexplicable pected, profound variation on reality, aCnodmMfoicrth.\"ael Kane, young nurse, who prostituted herself as film , and filmed \"reality.\" Wetzl, a part of her employment contract. The well-known organizer of film clubs in • tBheropeurgshon.~avllYerg~Uoi~e~s~s~ebyofStyhde liaison between the nurse and the wid- Italy, once worked as a projectionist in ower culminates in an extraordinary the theater where the film was shot, screenwdnthmgttaff of industry Shamanistic exorcism. A complex and rear-projecting and observing the films Field an IS metaphysical adventure far removed from behind the screen in mirror-re- professionals. from Hollywood narrative structures verse, hours at a time. and plots, this is a strongly poetic work PSFOocrreBieonnxtwo6nr9mte7r9as~r:A~cn9o0rc0po6onr9atatecdt that blends sepia tones of different co- Surely one of the top films at this lorations based on Korean picture lan- year's festival, and one of its most Los Angeles, guage to fuse past and present. (In a satisfying, was Peter Wollen's Friend- 213 659·3811 bravura performance, the roles of wife, ship's Death (Great Britain, 1987). whore, and nurse are played by the Wollen, a seminal figure in contem- same actress, Lee Bo-Hee). In this porary film theory and previously co-di- film, memory is threat, death is every- rector (with Laura Mulvey) of several where, and one's birthplace (a fabled ultra-avant-garde films, creates an out- land) is a space that cannot be re- standing work that deceptively appears covered. to be less experimental and more nar- rative. Similarly provocative was Toshio Matsumoto's Dogra Magra (Abracad- Reminiscent in odd but entirely fa- abra, Japan, 1988), based on an auto- vorable ways of both Louis Malle' s My biographical crime story written in the Dinner with Andre and Chris Marker's Twenties by an inmate of a psychiatric LaJetee, this metaphysical science-fic- clinic. The protagonist, a victim of to- tion-story-cum-political-thriller un- tal amnesia, who has perhaps been folds in a hotel room in besieged committed for his bride's murder, at- Amman, Jordan, in 1970 (where Wol- tempts with the \"help\" of two bizarre len himself was a journalist at the psychiatrists to regain his sanity, but he time). It consists almost entirely of becomes more heavily enmeshed in ever more sophisticated, exhilarating, gruesome revelations that mayor may philosophical discourses between a not be fantasies. Strongly expressionist British pro-PLO journalist and a mys- and trance-like, the work deliberately terious woman who claims to be an ex- \"fuses\" fantasy and reality so that the traterrestrial on a failed mission to disoriented viewer gropes blindly Earth. Paradoxes and bons mots (pro- through labyrinths of thwarted expec- found, rather than clever ones) prolif- tations until vertigo besets him. The erate, as does the delicious tension and mystification is intentional, absolute , 66
brilliant refraction of two extraordinary The elements of film minds in contestation. The final com- and film making puter-generated sequences approach, in emotional intensity and evocation of sCREENWRITING THE COMPLETE the inexplicable, the famed last 20 FILM DICTIONARY minutes of 2001, a testimon y to Wol- The Art, Craft and Business len's own current concern with com- of Film and Television Writing By Ira Konigsberg. \"A particularly valuable puters and artificial intelligence. reference work,\" said American Cinema- , The acting in the film is flawless and By Richard Walter. In what is sure to be- tographer of this comprehensive and quite astonishing; and Wollen's having come the definitive book on screenplay unique sourcebook, with over 3000 entries both authored and directed the film writing, Walter, chairman of the UCLA covering all aspects of film. \"This will lifts the achievement to still another screenwriting program, translates his cov- become the definitive film dictionary.\" level. Shades of French New Wave eted course into a manual for writers and -Library Journal. 512 pp. 71f2x 101h ~' critics-turned-filmmakers! But Wol- offers invaluable advice on how to create len, presently finishing his newest the scenes and dialogue that attract high- @ NAL BOOKS 0·453·00564-0 $24.501$34.50' book, has no intention of abandoning dollar studio contracts. the field of theory. ® PLUME 0-452·26086-8 $7.95/$10.95' THE STORY OF If all these films hover deliberatel y HUD, NORMA RAE AND HOLLYWOOD on the ambiguous border of reality and fantasy, Jan Svankmajer'sAlice (Switz- THE LONG HOT SUMMER By Barry Norman. The companion volume erland, 1988) remains , from start to fin- for the Turner Broadcasting System 10-part ish, within a surrealist dream universe Three Screenplavs bV television series. Illustrated with 225 photos, as created by one of the few true mas- Irving Ravetch and including 75 in full color. ters of contemporary animation. For al- Harriet Frank, Jr. most two decades this alchemist of the @ NAL BOOKS 0·453-00589-6 $19.50/NCR marvelous, this desperate humorist Edited by Michael Frank. Foreword by and member of Prague's famed surre- Martin Ritt. With biographical and critical • Price in Canada. Prices subject to change. alist circle, has acted as an incon- introduction by the editor. Exemplifying the Write to the NAL Education Department at gruous, inexplicable apostle of avant- art of writing for the screen, these screen- the address below for a free Literature and garde film in Czechoslovakia's rigidly plays are of particular interest because Language catalog. controlled cinema, creating one won- they were adapted from outside sources. drous short film after another. Alice is ® PLUME 0·452·26084·1 $9.95/$13.95' NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY his first feature, a magisterial invoca- tion of the universes of dreams and the 1633 Broadway, New York. NY 10019 magical. NAL Rather than illustrating Lewis Car- roll's work, the film , in its very struc- At 19,he married ture, aims to represent the essence of surrealism: the marvelous, the cruel , Joan Crawford. the erotic, the nightmarish , the a- moral. Reality is viewed as an inexpl - But she wasn't his first, or last, icable game: drawers forever refuse to leading lady. On screen and off, open or they vomit myriad magical ob- they included Marlene Dietrich jects; tears flow that can literally drown Rita Hayworth, and Katharine ' you; doors only open to reveal new Hepburn. His father was ascreen mysteries beyond. There are horrible, legend; his stepmother, Mary instantaneous size changes and com- Pickford; Laurence Olivier and pulsive, recurrent chases. Even Car- David Niven, lifelong friends. roll's erotic attraction to little girls is not slighted, and the famed trial scenes be- THE SALAD DAYS, come an uncomfortable analogy to Sta- like Niven's The Moon's a lin's show trials in all their mendacious , Balloon, 'is awarm, witty frightening absurdity. autobiography from one of Hollywood's most \"In our civilization,\" says Svank- glamorous leading men. majer, \"the dream, that natural wellspring of the imagination, is con- Illustrated with photographs stantly blocked, and in its place we find absurdity which grants precedence to ~Doubleday our 'scientific, rational system.' My film , on the other hand , is a dream. Dream as a reality. An active dialogue with my own childhood.\" And so the dream of cinema contin- ues to be dreamed. ~ 67
film, which he scripted from a story by Vasilij Grossman . Official explanations as to why the finished film was rejected were hard to obtain, he says , although he knows relevant documents exist at the Ministry for Cinematography that allege the film displays cynicism. The assorted informal reasons given him in- clude accusations that Commissar is chauvinistic and that it defames the revolution. He was informed , besides, that he didn't really have the talent to be a good filmmaker, and the film was cited as the best proof. On viewing Commissar, one can readily see what would have irked the authorities. When the pregnant woman commissar of an army unit dur- ing the 1922 fighting between the Reds and the Whites has a deserter exe- cuted , the scene is sympathetic to the soldier. The depiction of the Jewish family with whom the commissar is bil- leted to have her baby is warm and Raisa Nedaschkovskaya and Rolan Bykov in Commissar. heartfelt. There is also strong emphasis on the ever-present threat of pogroms crisp, no-nonsense demeanor. The facing the inhabitants of the town by William Wolf triumph was an event to savor. ghetto. Indeed , considerable Yiddish Askoldov is not given to glossing is spoken, unusual in a Soviet film and F or a creative artist the slamming over past controversy. The director is itself an element that probably contrib- of the door to one's career by still angry, and he isn' t forgivil!g. Now uted to the charge of chauvinism. As- government censors is a calamiry SO, he has lost the better part of his cre- koldov's sensitive treatment of the in some ways worse than impri son- ative years. Nor is he under any illusion Jewish family is in line with his com- ment. For So v iet film director AI- that permanent change is guaranteed , passion. Asked about his use of Yiddish exsandr Askoldov the door slammed cautioning: \"The people who have in a Soviet film , he expresses respect shut when he completed hi s first and banned films haven ' t disappeared. for the tradition of Yiddish films that only feature , Commissar, in 1967. It They have a talent for intrigue and fre- existed in the Twenties and for the rich was immediately banned , and for the quently are now among the leaders of contributions of Yiddish writers, along next 20 years Askoldov stood virtually perestroika in our national life . Today with a hope that there will be more at- blacklisted except for a few television there is a reversal process in our soci- tention paid to such works in the fu- jobs and a foray into \"experimental ety, but it' s bloody difficult, and lots of ture. No, he says, he is not Jewish mu sical theater,\" through which he sweat will have to be expended. \" himself. was able to express what he call s \" po- Askoldov is tall , with a markedly Askoldov also had the audaciry to in- litical and anti-fascist themes .\" erect posture. He dresses neatly, proj- sert a scene envisioning the Jewish Not until last December did Com- ecting a businesslike image. His dark family and other victims, all wearing missar get an official showing in Mos- hair recedes at the forehead, and his Jewish stars, being herded into a con- cow. After the ban was lifted in the new slightly down-turned mouth tends to centration camp. The commissar and atmosphere of glasnost, Askoldov and make him look grim until he smiles. others who had been walking behind his extraordinary film were invited to When he describes the perseverance them remain outside the gates. Paying the Berlin Film Festi val , where Com- with which he tried to get his film re- special attention to the persecution of missar won the special jury prize. Sud- leased, it is easy to picture him taking Jews has long conflicted with the So- denl y, Askoldo v wa s the focu s of on his adversaries. viet policy of downplaying Jewish international attention and critical Before making Commissar, Askol- identiry. praise, and he was clearly enjoying the dov had little film experience. He had turnabout. He strode confidently into a studied scriptwriting and directing in iven the central plot itself, a woman army officer who must Gpress conference that lasted an hour Moscow, the ciry of his birth , and fresh and a half and fielded question s with a out of school was allowed to make the Continued on page 72. 68
The Man who made 'Commissar' . by Anne Williamson When Peter Scarlet, the artistic di- AskoldoVs audacity. studio and then completely suppressed.\" rector of the International San But Askoldov would not leave it alone Francisco Film Festival, present- lowed the Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik seizure of power. Far more than and quietly bided his time. He raged. He ed the American premiere of Alexsandr bad timing resulted in the banning of the struggled. Eventually, he twisted in the film. Soviet censors realized that scenes wind. Askoldov's Commissar in March of this like the commissar's vision of the future Holocaust and of the Magazanik family \"I wrote a lot of letters to the govern- year he completed a task the festival had being led to the gas chambers hinted dark- ment saying that the destruction of works begun 21 years earlier. The poignancy of ly at a connection between Nazism and of art was barbaric, inhuman, impermis- the moment was not lost on the audience Russian anti-Semitism and could possibly sible. I produced analogies from recent nor on Mr. Askoldov, who said that for 21 remind audiences ofStalin's appeasement and past histories, and repression was the years the scandal of his film having been of Hitler. answer to my letters. Mter this I was banned, possibly even burned, and the dismissed under the formula that I was lost journey to San Francisco, had come to \"I wanted to do a film about human val- 'professionally incapable'. \" be a sort of family joke. He said that dur- ues, human worth. Those are the very ing particularly difficult moments some- categories which in our country for so The last bit is mindboggling in its injus- one was always sure to say, \"Don't worry many years were trampled underfoot. I tice. Aesthetically the film reaches back to didn't see the possibility of making any the experimental traditions ofSoviet cine- about it. Someday we and the Commissar compromises. I just didn' t sit passively ma during the Twenties; it is a visual when the film's fate was decided. I made knock out. Based on a short story by Vasily will travel to San Francisco.\" concrete suggestions which particularly ir- Grossman, a great historical transition of \"It was a bit ofan absurd joke when you ritated them. The former director of Gos- Soviet society is eloquently and realistical- kino (the official ~tate film agency) invited ly presented through the experiences of a think about it,\" the director continued. \"It me to come along and have a chat with handful of individuals. Askoldov's use of reminds me of the words of Chekhov's him. He patted my knee and said, 'I have montage, in two sequences particularly, is three sisters as they shout, 'To Moscow! two suggestions by which you could save remarkable. A brilliant metaphorical cross- To Moscow! To Moscow!' \" your creative career. Suggestion number cutting of soldiers, including the commis- one: Cut out that section where the Jews sar herself, struggling mightily to push a One can only speculate as to what are herded into the gas chamber. Number cannon up a hill of sand, and a birth se- Chekhov's sisters might have done had two: Let's think how we could change this quence, captures Vsevolod Pudovkin's they reached Moscow, but when Askol- Jewish family into a family of some other sense of realism, while the cavalry charge dov arrived in San Francisco it was with a nationality.' I was fighting an unequal bat- in which the commissar's revolutionary great deal to say. In the compelling tones tle. The film was shown only once in the lover dies a gallant death recalls the energy of a man wronged and with nothing left to lose, Askoldov condemned the newly res- tructured Soviet Film Maker's Union, the lethargy of Sovexportfilm, the moral cli- mate of the Soviet Union, which he char- acterized as \"deplorable,\" the \"incompe- tency\" ofStalin, bureaucrats of all nations, nationalists of every persuasion, and even managed a few well-placed swipes at Hol- lywood's current love feast with Soviet di- rectors. Askoldov's accumulated misfortunes, so many as to be nearly biblical, coupled with his tall, ungainly, dour presence, make him seem a character right out oflit- erature. Today, he is a man quickly gain- ing fame in the West as another cinema martyr of Leonid Brezhnev's reign of ba- nality. In 1967, just as Israel had tri- umphed in the Six Day War, Askoldov was finishing the edit on his first film, which sympathetically portrays a Jewish family. The impoverished Yefim and Mariya Magazanik, along with their brood of six children, are forced to provide a bil- let for a pregnant Red Army commissar during the Civil War that immediately fol- 69
and rhythm of Sergei Eisenstein. Nonna Mordyukova. Seduced by motherhood, arrested by duty. Askoldov's camera ricochets from stone one had a single airing on Soviet televi- Berlin Film Festival listing the names of walls to wooden doors to the sky above, following the trajectory of a young sol- sion. Even a stint in the musical theater dozens ofdirectors who panicipated in the dier's bullets. He signals that this boarded-up town in the Ukraine is now ended in disaster. festival. But one name is missing. The the Red Army's for the taking; a cannon belches and clatters over the city's cobble- \" I was able to stage some interesting name ofAskoldov, who took four prizes at stones, as naked children watch. Askoldov can-cans as well as some experimental that festival. Pravda didn't print a single cuts to the Magazanik's daughter tied and bound by her brothers unknowingly mim- musical plays about which the critics word about it.\" The film continues to be icking a pogrom-the screams for her mother are whispered but they thunder raved. But I was rash enough to speak attacked as being \"weak\" and \"without the origins of aggression. about serious problems even in this frivo- aesthetic value,\" most recently in an inter- The performance of the celebrated Ro- lan Bykov as the bewildered but undaunt- lous genre ... and for the second time I view with Elem Klimov, the president (on ed Yefim is stunning. Nonna Mordyukova makes the cruel and somewhat stupid was dismissed with the label 'professional- leave) of the Soviet Film Maker's Union, commissar a woman temporarily seduced by motherhood but arrested by her duty as ly inadequate.' \" in an issue of the journal Ogonyok. a revolutionary. Her counterpoint, Mar- iya, is lovingly accomplished in the hands Though failing as a cynic, Askoldov has All of which makes one wonder, are we of Raisa Nedashkovskaya. For fans of So- viet cinema there is great pleasure in see- succeeded admirably as a faithful , even witnessing a new-fangled form of exile in ing a you ng Vasily Shukshin, who anicu- lated the common people's point of view evangelical, believer in the morality of the which the wronged Soviet citizen is trot- as an actor and a director, in the role of the commissar's junior officer. That Askoldov Russian Revolution. The moments in ted out for Western consumption while re- was dismissed as \" professionally incompe- tent\" is a notorious deed of cynicism. Per- which the director discusses his faith take maining largely unknown to his own peo- haps this is precisely Askoldov's true po- litical crime-not Zionism, not imperialist on a truly surreal quality. \"I am a believer, ple? When a film is released in the Soviet chauvinism-but his failure in cynicism, an imponant Soviet state of mind. the Revolution is my religion, \" Askoldov Union, it can be as sparing as one unan- While doing graduate work at the De- passionately repeats again and again, em- nounced showing in one small cinema in a panment of Soviet Literature in the Writer's Union, Askoldov explained, \"It bracing an ideology in the name of which single city. How wide will be the domestic was in those years thar I made my first trag- ic mistake. Together with the widow of millions were slaughtered, (including As- release of Commissar come September is Mikhail Bulgakov (The Master and Mar- garita), in secret, without permission, I koldov's father in 1937), exiled, purged, not yet known. And since the opinionat- began to collect the archival materials per- taining to Bulgakov. In 1957, I published eliminated, snipped out of family photo- ed, fonhright, possibly reckless, and as yet the very first anicle about Bulgakov to ever appear in the Soviet Union but the graphs, and only occasionally rehabilitated unappeased Askoldov continues to rage, time for the world to Ieam that such a ge- nius as Bulgakov had lived was still ten but most often forgotten. his future should continue to be of interest years away. Soon after my work was sub- ject to the same pogrom as Commissar. I \"IOne would like to think that now that to the West. was a member of the Communist Parry. I Commissar has appeared in the West (and am convinced that the new leader- was removed from the Parry. Something like Kafka or Orwell.\" So tonuous have in the U.S. in June via Intemational Film ship at the Film Maker's Union the ins and outs of Askoldov's life been that, as improbable as it seems, he \"was Exchange), and is to be released in the So- doesn' t give the kind of leadership that removed from the Parry in the very same hall which 20 years from that date, Com- viet Union in September, the wrongs As- can unite and solidify talents,\" Askodov missar was finally shown. \" koldov has suffered have been righted and observes. \"There is a kind of unhealthy Ever onward, Askoldov took on two television documentaries to which he was a happy ending waits around the corner competition in which the new leaders are assigned. His approach to the work, as de- scribed, was innovative but apparently like some tantalizing blonde. Not hardly. emphasizing their own individuality. I also disturbing, as both films immediately disappeared upon completion, though \" There is a kind of predetermined hope you'll agree with me when I say that response to the events surrounding the the Soviet cinema didn't begin with the release of this film. The newspaper Soviet movies ofElem Klimov. I'm sorry, but we Culture published a long anicle on the did have a cenain Eisenstein, Dovz- 70
cracy would be incapable of doing such a NOSTALGIC SCI-FI & thing. The cooperation of strikebreakers HORROR ON VIDEO! and immoral people among the intelli- gentsia was required as well. That's where the essential tragic contradiction of our in- temal situation lies.\" Alexsandr Askoldov. Somewhat ironically, Askoldov even iiniste..- Cinema takes on American naivete, which may henko, Pudovkin, Kuleshov, Kozintzev. not be a bad idea since the director ofwhat With over 500 shock filled titles available . \"A lot ofSoviet directors don;t have ele- is sure to be the first American Soviet film Sinister Cinema is truly the leading source for co-production, Wamer Bros.' Stalingrad, your favorite sci fi and horror oldies on video. mentary human courage. They complain is Yuri Ozerov, a Brezhnevite who made Just send $2.00 for our eye popping catalogue , about the difficulties, the complexities of his reputation glorifying Stalin in Soviet or receive it free when you order any of the their lives and ask you to sympathize with war films. following films at the reduced price of . them. Things like a mosquito bite they' ll try to pass off as a wound sustai ned in bat- \"When in this day of glasnost people $12.95 ~~RLE tle. You have to be brave and you have to in the United States invite someone like do your business. It stupifies me that after Sergei Bondarchuk, who only half a year 1. NIGHTMARE CASTLE (1965) two and a half years of perestroika, not a ago said that Commissar should be bumed 2. TERROR CREATURES FROM THE GRAVE single deep, authentic, intellectual film because it is a Jewish picture, to discuss has been shot in the Soviet Union. the New Wave, then let us feel sorry for (1966) Barbara Steele the Soviet bureaucracy.\" 3. THE MANSTER (1959) \"Sure, you can do as much reconstruc- 4. VAMPIRE OVER LONDON (1951) tion as you like. You can buy nice film, you Sovexportfilm also received a healthy can cooperate with Hollywood, but if you dose of Askoldov's scorn. \"In West Berlin Bela Lugosi don't have anything inside you, then a distributor, a millionaire from West Ger- nothing will happen. So many directors many, approached me. When the repre- Please add $2.05 per title for packaging . handling . and are traveling to America, but they don't sentatives ofSovexportfilm saw him , they postage. Specify VHS or Beta . California residen ts please have any ideas. They're coming here be- swarmed around us and watched because add 6 V?% sales tax . Sorry, not available in PAl. Make checks cause they're running around shopping! they had seen his photograph in Stern and or money orders payable to : der Spiegel. He's quite famous. He said \"There is a great deal of material in my that he wished to distribute my film and Sinister Cinema film that later went into other Soviet films. would pay as much as for a Fellini film , a P.O. Box 777 . dept. FC In Scarecrow, the girl is persecuted, just price competitive with the world market. I Pacifica , CA. 94044 as my scene of the children's pogrom. In A had to tell him that only Sovexportfilm can Questions? ?? Call us at 415-359-3292 Dead Man's Letters, Bykov and the chil- resolve such questions. And they told the dren dance around a Christmas tree un- man that they already had a contract with MOVIE derground. Well, I did that 21 years ago in another company, the company with Commissar. There is a renowned animat- which they want to do business. With STAR ed cartoon artist by the name ofYuri Nor- perestroika, people must leam how to stein. He made The Tale ofTales, which is work instead of maybe sitting around the PHOTOS very good. But in his film a woman walks film market in Los Angeles.)) around singing a song that is from Alfred One of the world's largest collections of film Schnittke's original score for my film. Is there anyone who escapes Askol- personality photographs, with emphasis on dov's moral judgement unscathed? \"I rare ca ndids and European materi al. Send a \"The point is that the idea that art and have great sympathy for Gorbachev. I S.A.S.E. with want-list co: spirituality in Russia have been smothered sense the complexity, even the tragedy, by the bureaucracy alone is a particular perhaps even on a Shakespearean scale, of Milcon T. Moore, Jr. danger one might fall into. Alone bureau- what this leader has risked, what he has taken upon himself. The fact that I am Dept. Fe here is a metaphor, because of Gorba- chev. I was in West Berlin because of P.O. Box 140280 Gorbachev. Tomorrow everything might Dallas, Texas 75214-0280 be ... )) Marilyn, \"Bogey\", Gable and Here Askoldov's voice trailed off into si- liz are just a small sample of lence, perhaps because he had come upon names from the infinite the real nitty-gritty. In a society with one supply of photographs of the most enlightened constitutions on available to collect. We also earth but without an independent judicia- have a wide variety of ry to rigorously enforce the rights that con- posters. Now you can own stitution confers upon citizens, the Soviet your own piece of state remains a sorry sham. What we in the Hollywood. Send $2.00 for West are witnessing, including the release our illustrated catalogue with free poster insert to: of films that have captured our attention, Hollywood Collectibles, P.O. Box 7498, Dept. is only what has been allowed by the state. FCII, Rcgo Plrk, NY 11374. For example, even Tenghiz Abouladze's 71
film, Repentance, was made by the direc- Continuedfrom page 68. story o( a commissar leaving her baby tor's own admission under the guidance of choose between fighting at the front behind in order to fight is cruel. \"Then the then first secretary of the Republic of and her baby, one can readily see the you must protest against the cruelty of Georgia, Eduard Shevardnadze, who is storm Askoldov churned up in the doc- life. My own mother, a military doctor, now foreign minister. trinaire Brezhnev/Kosygin climate of left me alone to go to the front.\" It's a Askoldov, in eschewing pretty speech- the Soviet late Sixties. Leaving the bit of information that slips out unso- es about peace and co-existence in favor of baby with the Jewish family undoubt- licited and reveals the depth of feeling discussing, openly and specifically, the edly was a special irritant. the director obviously has concerning state of Soviet society and of Soviet cine- \"First they took the editing away his subject. ma, has calculated the risks and made his from me ,\" Askoldov recalls. \"The ed- Overall , Askoldov sees his film as ex- choice. \"Goodness, compassion, the kind iting room was sealed off. There were tolling the value of human life, re- of qualities we associate with Chekhov, no open discussions about the reasons flected in his treatment of the various thank God, all of that still isn't dead in the for the banning. I knocked at all sorts characters and their plights . \"That is Russian people, but it needs a renais- of doors, but I never received a reply. my religion,\" he asserts, stressing that sance. Our first duty is to express the prob- When my film was being looked at, I he's convinced any war is immoral and lems and complications inside our own so- was kept outside and told I could not against human nature. He cites Soviet ciety. And by doing that we will perform a see it. For the first time in 20 years I leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev's refer- valuable service to the whole ofhumanity. cried. ence to a quotation from Lenin that Gorbachev has only a few of the compe- \"I protested. I wrote letters. The ac- places the highest value on the life of tent assistants he needs. What I'm doing, tion taken against me was cruel. I was every human being. \"A lot of people in the honest things I'm saying, and the fact relieved of filmmaking and told I was our country during the stagnation of that I want people in America to see Com- professionally unqualified, that I was the last 20 years have said a lot about missar, is my effort to help Gorbachev. If not capable of making films. There the love of humanity but have forgot- the struggle is waged openly, the process were efforts to destroy the film , but we ten the individual,\" Askoldov ob- ofperestroika could occur quite normally. were able to preserve the essential serves. Th is is my part of the struggle.\" parts. I've had to restore it. No new scenes have been added. The film SkOldov tells the story of his ex- Asked about his future intentions, As- shown in Berlin is the one I made. In perience in the Ukrainian village A koldov sighed and said, \"Throughout getting it ready I did work on some of where he decided to film in order to these past 20 years in my mind I've been the editing nuances and on the music , give his drama a sense of reality. \"It's shooting so many films , I even see all the but this is the film as originally in- a real town , with real buildings and real scratches on the prints.\" Mter a pause, he tended. You saw a film that was streets, and there is real sky,\" he em- continued, \"I would do a philosophical planned a long time ago as it was orig- phasizes. \"When we wanted to film the film about my feelings on perestroika. I inally conceived.\" scene in which there is dancing, we no- would like this film to reflect not only the ticed that many of the inhabitants who experience I've collected over the last 20 Commissar. had gathered were crying. It turned out years but my previous experience as well, that this was the very spot where dur- because the meanderings of my own biog- Askoldov's background may have ing World War II there was a mass raphy are very typical of what is going on in made things more difficult for him. His shooting of Jews.\" the Soviet Union today. father died in one of Stalin's labor camps. \"I don' t remember my father,\" By virtue of his vindication, Askol- \"Ten years after they shelved the film the director says. \" He was a commissar dov is spotlighted as a symbol of the and tried to bum it, it was shown behind in the civil war. I know he was a brave need to rectify the long list of abuses closed doors in Goskino for some kind of person . People tried to kill him, once that injured other creative artists under bureaucratic higher-ups. I found out about when he organized fraternization be- Soviet censorship, \"All ofdie decisions it, went there, entered the hall, they saw tween Soviet and German soldiers. He were made behind closed doors ,\" he me, took me by the scruff of the neck, and was also captured by the Polish says. But he doesn't profess to know shoved me out the door. I said, 'Why? It's Whites.\" how many situations like his may exist, my film. I want to see it.' They told me, and how many films that no one has quite seriously, that it was a very harmful His mother's background has played heard of may be awaiting release. film and that I shouldn't see it another un- a major role in shaping the film. As- necessary time. This episode could be a koldov scoffs at complaints that the Under the present preoccupation kind of tragicomic frame for the entire pic- with perestroika, Askoldov points out, ture. No one else will shoot a film like this. a conflict commission reviews banned films and arbitrates disputes. (A rep- Only I can.\" resentative of the commission was Twenty years is a long time to be away present at the Berlin festival.) from the languageoffilm. Two decades of \"I hope there are no new drawers or neglect and repression make for some very refrigerators in which to put films,\" As- heavy baggage to carry through life. Is the koldov says apprehensively. Now that Soviet state's commitment to democrati- Commissar has emerged in triumph, zation deep enough to allow this fervid, and after 20 years of stalemate and unyielding revolutionary another shot at shrugs, Askoldov wants to resume his the screen? If it is, then when that film is career. He has one advantage: he has completed, and the audience marches in, had plenty of time to read and write. \"I I, for one, want to be in that number. ~ didn't have to hurry,\" he says. ~ 72
Tanner'88: For Real Isfor Now Michael Murphyas Jack Tanner, the presidential hopeful. by Richard T. Jameson doodling (Quintet, A Peifect Couple, room for one more. In Altman's own Health) and he gets Disney and Para- words, \"We created a candidate. We sur- CAMPAIGN MANAGER: A really mount to pick up the tab (Popeye) . C lose rounded him with a team. We' re going on good TV ad helps a good candidate get the last cinematic doors on him and he the campaign trail and we' re sending two bette r. It's not so much that they believe starts directing cine matic plays (Come cameras along to document the event we the ad as they aspire to it. They want the Back to the 5 and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jim- created .\" people to believe they are who they say my Dean)- and then tums around and they are. ... That's why the T anner cam- makes movies of them, in supe r-1 6mm , Tanner '88: The Dark Horse, the hour- paign \" For Real\" has been so successful. for cable TV, public TV, anyone willing to long fi rst installme nt, pre mie red on the TV R EPORTER: What happened to buy a little culture on the cheap. eve of the New Hampshire primary. Sev- \"The Future Is Now\"? eral days earlie r, Jack T anne r (M ichael CAMPAIGN M A NAG ER: We ll , Mol- It sounds like a cruel comedown from Murphy), a forme r Congressman from ly, \"The Future Is Now\" was the n, and th e w id esc ree n wo rld-co nqu e rin g of East Lansing, Michigan, is traveling the \"For Real\" is now. McCabe and Mrs. Miller and Nashville. wintry New E ngland back roads in the But that was then and this is now. In point company of his college-age daughte r Alex Robert Altman seemed to have offact, Altman's work in the E ighties rep- (Cynthia N ixon) and an inte rested press come out of nowhe re in 1970 resents a heroic study in survival, profes- when, as the 14th choice director sionally and aesthetically. He could corps of approxi mately one (Kevin J. on the movie M*A*S*H, he exploded the scarcely stop being a maverick, so he bo und a ri es of co mm e rc ial Ame ri ca n figu red out a way to be a viable one. O'Connor as a counte rculture leftover filmmaking. Maybe that's why he's been named Hayes T aggerty). The locals, so resourceful at defining his own brand of Tanner '88, Altman's curre nt project grown skeptical and also cheekily cozy space, onscreen and off. for HBO, is the latest manifestation of the with having the ir political flesh pressed , director's semi-unde rground creativity. mostly can' t place his name. His young Tell him he doesn't fit into Hollywood It's also the most exciting, and easily the staff, headed by forme r Kennedy team and he creates his own studio (Lion's most ente rtaining, thing he's done in the Gate). Tell him even his most faithful fans past decade. He and Garry Trudeau, of player T J. Cavanaugh (Pamela Reed), have grown exasperated with his in-house Doonesbury fame, decided that the vast and vapid field of Democratic conte nders has little more idea who he is or how best for the 1988 Presidential nomination had to sell him to the electorate. T he viewer is similarly lInslire how to approach Tanne r. Altman introduces him as a talk show guest on New Hampshire 73
TV-more precisely, as an image on a TV the room lights in exasperation. is an eamest of veracity and immediacy. It monitor-where he smiles pleasan tly, And how sweet it is to contemplate a accords perfectly with Altman's desires to milks applause for being from many erase the barriers between fact(oid) and hometowns (he grew up an Air Force candidate, even a fictitious one, who can fiction, to \"find out what the political pro- brat), and generally comes across as your rag a joumalist pal for theorizing about the cess is by joining it.\" standard-issue bland liberal, albeit one part Jesse Jackson's bastard birth may with a Ph.D. have played in making him a compulsive Altman's Nashville (1975) got under- achiever (\"Jesus, you don' t miss a Freud- way with a credit sequence tricked up to He's encountered next on another vid- ian freckle, do ya?\"), and stay ticked resemble a hard-sell , K-Tel-style record eo monitor, this time at Tanner head- enough to embellish the theme later in the album commercial; a lot of moviegoers quarters, where his staff is scoping out a day. Drinking a beer with Hayes Taggerty were mystified because they seemed to be preposterously Mister Rogers-style cam- just before stepping over to speak at a rural looking at a preview for the movie they'd paign spot: Tanner sweeping snow off his barbecue, he tarries long enough to gibe, already bought tickets to see. Similarly, front walk, saying \"Oh hello there,\" then \"Oh, by the way, I Ieamed to drink to the premiere of Tanner '88: The Dark excusing himself to go inside and answer a please my father whom I wanted to mur- Horse really began, even before the HBO phone that has begun to ring \"off the der so I could then marty my motherl \" Is Special Presentations logo hit the screen, hook\" (CU of receiver rocking on desk- this the Adlai Stevenson of the Eighties? with a combined teaser for the show and top) with suggestions that he run for the advertisement for Tanner's candidacy. I Presidency. The spot switches to back- YOu ~ou~d miss Altman's, credit at t~e was sitting there with my finger on the ground bio, Tanner's father in World War begmnmg of Tanner 88 and stili VCR remote and failed to realize I should II. \"This footage looks very familiar,\" have been taping already. You never T J. remarks. Deke, the video man, an- know immediately who made it. The know, from one moment to the next, swers, \"I lifted it from a Dole film cam- main-title scene (post talk show appear- which way Tanner '88 is going to be \"for paign. I mean, hell, he lifted it from stock, ance) features a camera noodling among reaL\" right? You don' t really think they sent a the clutter on a semi-reflecting tabletop at crew out to film a future wounded Presi- Tanner HQ, catching bleary glimpses of Take those cameos by Pat Robertson, dent that day?\" \"But Jack's father was a the staffers between coffee cups and ash- Gary Hart, and Bob Dole, all going along pilot,\" another staffer points out. \"You trays, candidate matchbooks and Egg with the gag~ach in his own smiley- better use Bush's footage!\" McMuffin boxes, while on the soundtrack apprehensive way-and swapping shop talk with candidate Tanner as their cam- This sort of raillery percolates through- several conversations overlap and T. 1- paign trails cross. One would love to know out the episode. However, Altman and how their participation was connived at, Trudeau aren't out to create an improved Cavanaugh holds telephonic communica- how ad-libbed the shooting situation was. version of Washingtoon's Bob Forehead. tion with the-man-who, temporarily After Robertson and Michael· Murphy Once he arrives on the scene himself, Jack stranded in Durham. trade innocuous chitchat, Kevin J. O'Con- Tanner begins to establish his personal Ie- nor thrusts himself forward, in character as gitimacy-a thoughtful , quietly ironical Altman shoots Tanner just like an Alt- Hayes Taggerty, and pitches Robertson a guy half-bemused and half-appalled at the man movie, with one decisive exception: curve about \" playing Christian hardball\" processes of modem politicking, willing to he's working in video, not film. Now, vid- in the last days of the New Hampshire play the electoral game but mindful of its eo is a recalcitrantly nonvoluptuous medi- campaign. Robertson skips a beat, then ethical hazards and how short it falls of um given to glaring highlights and metallic hunches his shoulders and starts easing serving the grandeur of democracy. He's color tones, and the sound is nowhere near out ofcamera range, while delivering him- read Daniel Boorstin, and tries to share his Lion's Gate eight-track in quality. Yet vid- self of an all-purpose riff about how his concem about \"human pseudo-events\" eo works for Tanner, maybe works better \"athletic background\" prepared him for with his staff. Then he tums around, dis- than more lushly manageable celluloid that. Did Robertson know O'Connor covers Deke filming him, and snaps off would. (The cameraman is Jean Lepine, wasn't a real joumalist? Would it have who has assisted cinematographer Pierre Mignot on Altman's impress ionistic mattered? Eighties film s.) Video is the medium of Not all the targets ofopportunity appear the Six o'clock news; the mobile minicam onscreen. T J. Cavanaugh keeps fielding Confeffing with Way/on Jennings at Nashville fundraiser. phone calls from Congressman Joe Ken- nedy (\"I don't know which way you should vote, Joe. Ask your uncle\"). At one moment-a particularly fine one for the wonderful Pamela Reed-T. 1- loses her cool and sobs, \"Bobby, I don't have time for this! ... Did I say that?\" There's a good deal of quotable sniping at the per- sonalities of many real-life candidates and not a few real-life newspapers and net- work news divisions. Trudeau , who's married to Today host Jane Pauley, has written an affectionately nasty NBC news star role for Veronica Cartwright (\"Hey, Molly, the committee writing your piece wants a conference call\"). Two of the news people maintain a run- 74
Now you can rent VHS or Beta video- tapes by mail of over 700 hard-to-find qual- ity films, including Aquirre - The Wrath of God, Ran, The Seventh Seal, 81/2, Lianna, The Marriage ofMaria Braun, Black Or- pheus, Closely Watched Trains, My Beau- tiful Laundrette, Burden ofDreams, Plxote, Entre Nous, Stranger Than Paradise, The Seven Samurai, and B erlin Alexanderplatz. Our ever-expanding library includes for- eign and independent films , limited release features, Hollywood classics, cult favorites and documentaries. Members simply order toll-free, and receive cassettes promptly by mail or UPS. 10% discount on members' videotape pur- chases. It's simple and inexpensive. Phone or write for free information and a list of films. GREAT GIFT IDEA. 1-800-258-FILM (in PA, 1-800-633-FILM) Tanner greets his public. -U--HoFimlmeFestiwI Videotape Rentals by Mail FC5/88 P. O. Box 2032, Scranton, PA 18501 ning argument about what is and isn't fair they don't, they put such a bright spin on Our most current poster catalog, in reporting the private lives ofcandidates. their wickedness that it'·s easy to forgive 44 pages (8%\" x 11 \") with over 300 The Post puts killer talent David Seidel- them. But Altman at his best-and a lot of photos & accompanying text man (Richard Cox) on the bus in Part Tanner is Altman at his best-is such a (about 85 in full color, including loving master of his medium that he tran- front & back covers!). Mailed Two, Tanner' 88: For Real (which aired scends limitations, in his material and in with outside wrapper on receipt himself He isn' t just taking satiric pot- of $7.00 U.S. funds by first class in March), after the dark horse has shots. Here and there, as in T. j.'s Bobby mail. emerged unexpectedly strong from New Kennedy faux pas, or Michael Murphy's Our new location , a gallery on Hampshire. Hayes Taggerty, the only magnificent, impromptu five-minute 1932-F Polk SI. (near corner of press person who is aware that divorce monologue that brings The Dark Horse to Pacific Ave.), San Francisco, CA Jack Tanner is enjoying occasional over- a finely refracted close, he glimpses au- 94109. Open Mondays nights with a lady friend, rebukes Seidel- thentic mystery: what people want, what through Saturdays , 11 AM to 6 man for his role in deep-sixing Gary Hart: they gather themselves into nations to PM Pacific time. \"People like you took one of the best poli- have, what they sometimes forget they ticians of his era and tumed him into a side need so desperately. CINEMONDE show in the supermarket media.\" In the HBO initially contracted for the first two 1932·F POLK STREET next half-hour segment, Tanner '88: SAN FRANCISCO, hours' worth of Tanner '88 and has given Night ofthe Twinkies (April), Seidelman is 94109 allowed a measure of self-justification: Altman and Trudeau the nod for eight' \"These people make their own choices; more episodes: two half-hours per month, all we can do is react... . These guys, each May through August. So far, nothing fatal ofthem, want to be the most powerful per- has occurred in the actual, ongoing cam- son on the planet. That means right away paign to leave the fictional candidate look- we're not dealing with well-adjusted here. ing ridiculous by his air date. But in a de~ We're dealing with obsession.... The velopment Altman must relish , the stakes are just too high.\" making of this limited series for television has taken on all the jeopardy of the cam- Robert Altman's own obsessions are paign itself What kind of lead time will they have for each episode? What will they honored in Tanner '88. Political satire like do? And how in the pluperfect hell are this is frought with peril, tempting a show- they ever going to do it? Tanner' 88 could man like Altman toward the sort of glib, sophomoric put-down to which he has of- end up being the best thing to come out of ten shown himself susceptible. Mostly, he this presidential year. ~ and fellow wise-guy Trudeau have been avoiding the temptation, and even when 75
'Aria' Operatunities by Michael Walsh Godard's musc/ebound narcissism . .. L et's check it out: \"Nessun dorma\" (No one T he opera may not be over until least has got the sex thing right. As sleeps). Who cares that this is the aria the fat lady sings, but remember Oliver North might say, it's a neat idea: that Calaf, the unknown prince, sings this: It's not fundamentally to round up ten directors and turn them at the beginning of Act Three when the about fat ladies. Granted, opera stages loose on an opera aria or extended seg- entire population of Peking is trying to are populated with great singing Hefty ment, letting each director's visual discover his name so that the ice prin- Bags and man-mountains who shake imagination dictate plot, form, and im- cess Turandot won't have to go to bed the earth with their cries. But what are agery. Several of the auteurs are the with him? To Ken, it's the story of a they crying about? Sex, that's what. Or usual suspects, including Ken (Liszto- luscious teddy-clad blonde (British thinking about having sex. Or wanting mania, Mahler, The Music Lovers) Rus- stripper Linzi Drew) who, in a trance, to have sex. Or preventing someone sell, Bruce Beresford (who directed is having ruby-red jewels applied to her else from having sex. Whether the per- Puccini's Girl ofthe Golden West a cou- body by 'a stylized cohort of black sha- formers are fat is irrelevant. Opera is ple of seasons ago in Charleston), and mans. It's a miscegenist's nightmare, not about fat people at all! It's not even Robert Altman (who recently staged the innocent blonde defiled, until sud- about singing! It's about sex! Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress). The denly reality intrudes: the girl is an ac- rest of the field comprises Bill Bryden, cident victim, the jewels are horrifying This is opera's dirty little secret, so Jean-Luc Godard, Derek Jarman, wounds received in a car crash (her well-hidden that for years American Franc Roddam, Nicolas Roeg, Charles head has gone through the windshield) men and women have abandoned its Sturridge, and Julian Temple, wres- and the shamans are doctors and manifest pleasures to the moneyed, tling with art in the temple of com- nurses, trying desperately to patch her the gay and the nerdy-to human-ca- up. It looks bleak until they apply nary fanciers whose intermission chat is merce. shock treatment to the swelling bare peppered with such arcane terminol- On the whole, it's a pin at the count breas~s and-wham, bam, thank you, ogy as \"covered tone,\" \"heldenbari- ma'am-the heart kicks in as Puccini tone,\" and \"tessitura.\" Such chatter of three, with a couple of split deci- tumesces. It's bold, daring and abso- probably has served to drive away more sions. Winners: Ken Russell, who lutely original; no one but Russell potential patrons than Florence Foster chips in with a stunning gloss on \"Nes- would have thought of this. Forget Jenkins, in tinsel and tulle, unsteadily sun dorma\" from Turandot; Godard, Gothic. Ken's back and Aria's got him. essaying the high F as Mozart's Queen who puts two naked girls in a French of the Night in The Magic Flute. bodybuilding gym with a heap of mus- Godard's hot weekend sets the cle studs and Jean-Baptiste Lully; and breasts and buttocks of Marianne Pe- Now along comes Aria, producer Nic Roeg, freebasing the attempted as- terson and Valerie Allain wiggling and Don Boyd's operatic decathlon that, sassination of King Zog (his real name) jiggling among the pumped lats, pecs, whatever its cinematic deficiencies, at of Albania (his real country) at the Vi- quads, and abs of a gymful of French enna Opera back in '31, to the strains Aria: Jarman's super-B reverie . .. of Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera. ... and Russell's ritualism. 76 1
ironmen, accompanied by the baroque of the Leontyne Price Hour, for the LIGHTS! CAMERA! plaint of Lully's Armide. (Groucho great American soprano is heard doing REACTION! would never have gone to this picture.) her bad thing in no less than four of the A film hves or dies on how it In the opera, a popular baroque sub- ten tunes. affects an audience. In the Criti- cal Studies Program at USC's ject, Armida is a sorceress who tends to School of Cinema-Television, students learn to recognize and Ihave her way with men. Rinaldo, how- t would be neat to report that the rest appreciate those quahties which of the film is up to this level , but it can make a film a lasting work ever, is resistant to her charms, and she of art. can't make up her mind whether to kill would be wrong. Sturridge's b&w , Critical Studies at USC offers him or let him live; the aria \"Rinaldo VH-1 quickie is a morality tale about BA, MA, and PhD degrees in Cinema-Television Critical Asleep\" documents her quandary. No joy-riding waifs who come to grief in a Studies and now a new doctoral program in Film & Literature. passion here: these femmes coquettes stolen car, driven out of their minds , Classes are conducted in the have no effect on the unconscious ath- .apparently, by the syrupy holy music Cinema-Television Center; the best equipped facility for film letes; it's strictly sauve qui peut, an es- from Verdi's La Forza del Destino that and television study in the world. say in masculine-feminine in which the accompanies their journey. Beresford 's All of this is made even more Y chromosome has its rough way with excerpt from Korngold's Die Tote attractive by USC's Los Angeles location which offers the X'es. What do women want? Stadt-a score from his wunderkind, the unlimited resources of a city which was built around the film Roeg's operatic walkabout has more pre-Hollywood days-is the most con- industry of a story line. Zog, it seems, was set ventional of the lot, wedding Travel & To find out more about film and television study at USC call upon one eve at the opera by crazed Al- Leisure scenes of an empty, abandoned (213) 743-6071 or mail the coupon below to: Program banian terrorists, who had at him with Bruges (the opera's site) with a couple Manager; Division of Critical Studies, USC School of Cin- guns blazing. Zog, however, shot back, . making love in a lonely place. ema-Television, Los Angeles, CA 90089-2211 . and managed to waste his attackers. Altman's Les Boreades has a prom- lUJ@© Roeg casts his wife, Theresa (No kin to ising premise: How would an 18th cen- CINEMA Ken) Russell in the pants role as Zog, tury audience composed entirely of the TELEVISION mirroring the assassination plot ofVer- lame, the daft, and the lewd behave at At the University of Southern C alifornia di'sBallo in his silent-era throwback. It a performance of Rameau ? But beyond NAME _______________________ lacks the depth of Russell or Godard, gathering the extras from his 1986 STREET _____________________ but it's high-spirited fun, and Theresa Rake's Progress in Paris and letting CITY _____________ STATE _ _ always looks great, even with a mus- them flash their bums at each other, he ZIP ____________ tache. does nothing with it; even Rameau Please Check One: 0 BA 0 MA 0 PhD You might also be amused by Tem- isn't this boring. Jarman's \"Depuis le ple's Rigoletto, if only for the view of Jour\" from Charpentier's Louise is a the Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo, sweet memory play, the flash back rem- the ultimate fantasy motel. Take Buck iniscences of an old actress taking her Henry, marry him to the ooh-Ia-la An- last bow, but it makes a slim finale. ita Morris, let him have an affair with Woven among the segments are Bry- the ooh-la-la Beverly D'Angelo, let den'sPagliacci bits, with John Hurt, in Morris have an affair with a stud and the Caruso-Canio role, gradually work- put them all in adjoining suites at the ing up to \"Vesti la giubba\" to impress Madonna, as managed by Feydeau, Sophie (Young Sherlock Holmes) Ward. and you get some idea of Temple's art. But by the end of the film, no one can It's a little long, not quite funny remember why. enough, and both the actresses are OK, Aria is not perfect. Still, it's a forced to keep their shirts on. Still, it's start. Opera movies are usuall y so not bad for an absolute beginner, even dreadful that they reinforce everyone's if it doesn't have Sade, a race riot, or prejudices rather than overturning Ray Davies. them. Let's hope the lessons of this Roddam's Tristan paraphrase gets an film-the Russells and Godards-are honorable mention. Strictly speaking, learned. Stage directors aren't respect- Isolde's \"Liebestod\" is a solo auto-da- ful of tradition any more, so why should fe; Tris is already history by the time film directors be? Film is the perfect this fat lady sings. But Roddam's medium for opera. Besides, it seems What-if? sets James Mathers, Bridget every director is a closet opera fan these (Daughter of Peter) Fonda, and her in- days. What is Moonstruck but the white teresting mole among the tulle and tin- bread around which the spicy meatball sel of Las Vegas, carrying out a sex- of La Boheme is hoagied? Opera is hot, and-suicide pact in a sleazy motel off raunchy and ready: brother gets it on the Strip. Not for the squeamish: there with sister, stepson with father's wife, is an explicit wrist-slashing sequence, teenage boys with older women. Not ala Seneca, preceded by a slightly less for nothing is Glenn Close hung up on explicit humping that would do Wag- Madame Butterfly in Fatal Attraction. ner, that champion humpster, proud. No Hefty Bags need apply and, in Aria To all of which Leontyne Price warbles at least, none did. Anybody for Ensem- ecstatically. Aria, in fact, is something ble? ®
To THE EDITOR: Not only was it in my opinion at that time Mr. Russo is not correct here where I am concerned. When I wrote about Mi- the worst of the Chaplins, it was also inter- chael Bennett and Donna McKechnie I had never met, nor did I know, either of Thank you for Brian Taves' \"Charlie minably long-winded. I brought a book. them. Is he suggesting I should have spec- ulated in print that their marriage was not Dearest\" in the April issue. Certainly Once the film had started and I over- \"kosher,\" based on some kind of general hearsay? I think marriage is a serious legal nothing is to be gained from painting a pic- heard the dialogue on the monitor speak- step. And I do not think my job as a colum- nist is to call into question the validity of ture of any great artist as someone above er, my opinion changed as I realized that such legal agreements. If that were true I would have to question 80 percent of the the frailties the rest ofus are prone to. This this is a brilliant film! I put the book down heterosexual marriages made in New York and Hollywood. I don't pretend to know is perhaps the single greatest fault of those and remained spellbound by Chaplin. who is for real and who isn't. I don't feel obligated to set the public straight on such who revere their heroes and place them on That spell has never been broken. matters, forgive the pun. pedestals to be worshiped-be that hero -REG HARTT Later I did meet both Bennett and McKechnie, but they never discussed Christ or John Ford. their personal lives with me. And may I say Donna McKechnie's remembrance of From all accounts the close proximity of Bennett at his memorial service was the most emotionally outstanding of all there. a creative artist at work is dangerous ToTHE EDITOR: I suppose Russo thinks I should have then stood up in the audience and yelled ground to inhabit. I understand Count \"Fire!\" Leo Tolstoy was an absolute bear while David Thomson's article on Robert Red- writing War and Peace. Monsieur Ver- ford (Feb. '88) struck me as a bunch of Russo's objection to my objection to Harvey Fierstein for thanking his \"lover\" doux is my personal favorite of the Chaplin wordy, esoteric baloney. In the Holly- at the Tony Awards is long hashed and warmed over. I have said all along it was a films. Hearing the account of what a mis- wood world of flakes and foul-mouths, I personal taste. I am not crazy abou t sexual erable S.O.B. he was throughout its cre- suppose Redford is a puzzling rarity: obvi- revelations in public. I just don't find \"lover\" a very dignified word. I still think ation, I find the strength to ignore the as- ouslya principled man struggling to main- Harvey could have expressed his love, his saults of those who feel similarly about tain his balance in the slippery, booby- respect, his regard, and his intimacy with myself while the \"mood\" is on me. As trapped arena of public adoration. It is the person without calling him \"my should all artists. precisely that aura that made his extreme- lover.\" This is a matter of personal taste. ly fine portrayal of the weary and wounded I know from experience that librarians, Roy Hobbs in The Natural so believable. -LIz SMITH with their natural penchant for order, are Heroic? You bet. Leave the crass and the natural foes of writers who seem to crummy to the evening news. Even the VITO Russo REPLIES: thrive in the midst of chaos but who intu- eruptive Debra Winger can find nothing itively snatch from the chaos the order that worse to say than that he is \"definitely a The fact that Liz \"supposes\" I think she is implicit in it. \"Charlie Dearest\" has only gentleman.\" I'll buy that. should have yelled \"Fire!\" at Michael made my respect for Charlie all the stron- Bennett's memorial service is sad, insult- ger. I hope that someday Brian Taves will Critics be damned. When I watch Red- ing, and revealing. Though this debate is, have the pleasure not only of having his ford weave his screen magic I forget to eat as she says, long hashed and warmed over, faults dredged up by those with whom he my popcorn. WHATSSOBADABOUT she still doesn't understand what the issue worked but also that of looking back upon BEING GOOD? really is. People wouldn't be afraid to a body of work that stands the test of time come out of the closet if they weren't and speaks today more powerfully than it Oh, and while I'm at it, I admire Cher's made to think that their homosexuality ever did. talent. But not her tiresome and limited was a strictly sexual and therefore private vocabulary. She is more impressive speak- aspect oftheir humanity. People who sup- Chaplin's statement, \"People come to ing other people's words from a script. port the idea that homosexuality should see me\" may sound like the remark of a remain a dirty secret contribute to this un- supreme egotist, but it is also the truth . There. I feel better. happy situation. The use of the word -JEAN MORTENSON \"lover\" (about which I am also not crazy) isn't and shouldn't be the point. Maybe Just as we go to Marx Brothers movies to it's generational, but for people like Smith, legal and public heterosexual mar- see the Marx Brothers and Woody Allen riage is \"for real\" and public declarations of homosexuality are just offensive sexual pictures to see Woody-Allen, although I SIRS: revelations. I've heard all the excuses for why well-known people should not come am one of the few who can't stand the out of the closet, and they're all shit. '~i:f sight of him. Florey, for all of his abilities, Vito Russo, whose gay revolutionary tac- was a conventional filmmaker. Chaplin tics I generally admire, has gotten lots of was and remains one of the great artists of mileage out of his comments that \"Liz our time. Smith's rhapsodic reports of the marriage The first time I saw Chaplin'S Lime- between Michael Bennett and Donna light, because I sponsored the showing McKechnie neatly echoed Hedda Hop- per's effusive gushing over Rock Hud- and hardly anyone turned out, I thought it son's marriage to Phyllis Gates 30 years terrible. A friend needed a projectionist in earlier. Hedda and Liz were not fooled a lurch and called to ask if I would help. I but knew that their job was to help the asked what he was showing and shud- public fool themselves.\" dered when I found out it was Limelight. 78
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Quiz #30/31: Who Was That Man/Woman? Contributors Pat Aufderheide is a Washington-based sen- We dropped the quiz last issue, so we're For QUIZ #31, you are asked to iden- ior editor and film critic for In These Times. David Chute holds the Asian Film Desk at atoning by running a' matching set this tify the films in which each of the 25 fe- the L.A. Weekly. Elaine Dutka is a corre- spondent for Time specializing in entertain- time. For QUIZ #30 you are asked to male title characters appeared. Same rules ment. David Edelstein is a film critic for The Village Voice. Paul Fonoroff is a Hong identify the films in which each of the 25 and deadlines apply, except that the entry Kong-based filmmaker and critic for TUB- Pearl TV who has been studying Chinese mov- male title characters appeared. If the should be addressed to Quiz #31. ies for many years. Karen Jaehne is a New York-based freelance writer. Richard Jame- name were \"Sheridan Whiteside,\" your 1. Lale Anderson son is film critic for Pacific Northwest in Seat- 2. Annie Brennan tle. Dave Kehr is film critic for the Chicago answer would be The Man Who Came to 3. Nicole de Loiselle Tribune. Pat McGilligan's biography of Dinner; Robert Stroud was the Birdman 4. Helene Desvallees Robert Altman will be published in the winter ofAlcatraz. Sources included The Ameri- 5. Millie Dillmont of 1988 by St. Martin's Press. John Powers is can Movies Reference Book and The New 6. Liza Elliott film editor of the L.A. Weekly and film critic of York Times Film Reviews. The contestant I 7. Charlotte Giraud California Magazine. Michael Singer is the 8. Tess Harding author and compiler of the annual reference who correctly identifies the most titles 9. Jean Harrington work Directors: A Complete Guide. Elliott 10. Rose Louise Hovick Stein teaches film at Fairfield University. Da- wins a free year ofthis magazine. In case of 11. Hildy Johnson vid Thomson's latest book Warren Beatty 12. Paula McFadden and Desert Eyes will be published in paper- a tie, the winner will be chosen at random. 13. Julie Morrison back by Vintage in June. Amos Vogel, author 14. Rusty Parker of Film as a Subversive Art, was the founder of Get your entries to Quiz #30, FILM 15. Rhoda Penmark Cinema 16 and co-founder and first director of 16. Diana Scott the New York Film Festival. Michael Walsh COMMENT, 140 West 65th Street, New 17. Catherine Sloper is music critic for Time. Armond White writes 18. Jo Stockton for New York's City Sun and Paper. Anne York, N .Y. 10023, by June 13. 19. Dorothy Stratton Williamson is a California-based writer about 20. Annie Sullivan Soviet cultural affairs whose work appears in 1. Manny Balestrero 21. Maria Vargas The Wall Street Journal. William Wolf writes 2. Travis Bickle 22. Christine Vole reviews and articles on film and teaches at New 3. Seth Brundle 23. Priscilla Williams York University. 4. Tony Camonte 24. Sarah Woodruff 5. Freddie Clegg 25. Nina Ivanova Yakushova Photocredits 6. Rodrigo Diaz Alfred A. Knopf: p.ll. Cinema City: p.8, 35 7. Michael Dorsey For QUIZ #28, you were asked to (1 ,2), 43 (2), 47, 50. Cineplex Odeon: 60 (1). 8. John Yerkes Iselin 0&8: 45. Film Society of Lincoln Center: 58, 9. Sanjuro Kawabataka compose a list of languages in which mov- 60 (2). Courtesy Paul Fonoroft\": 53, 54, 55, Jon 10. Midge Kelly ies were spoken. How about ... 80? Gardey: 26 (2). Golden Harvest: 34 (1),36,38 11. Julius Ferris Kelp (1,2), 4D, (1,2), 42, 51 , 52. Katyn Grenfell: 76 12. Frankie Machine That's the number Richard Leskowsky (1). HBO: 73, 74, 75. Historic Pictures Service: 13. Mark Lewis 2. International Film Exchange: 63, 68, 69, 70, 14. Col. William (Bull) Meechum came up with-from Afghan-Pushto to 72. Island Pictures: 24, 26 (1). Kino Interna- 15. Bill Miner tional: 57. Miramax: 76 (2) Museum of Mod- 16. Jerry Mulligan Yoruba, and including Assamese, Gujar- em Art: 12, 14, 15, 16,28,29. Clare Muller: 76 17. Sol Nazerrnan (3). Teny O'Neill: 23. Courtesy George Ol- 18. Painless Peter Potter ati, lbo, Kirghiz, Oriya, Tupi, Wolof, and sen: 4. Orion Classics: 18 (1 ,2), 20 (1,2). Erika 19. Tom Powers \"contrived\" (Quest for Fire). Are these Rabau: 71. Andy Schwartz: 31 (1). Saliva 20. Jakie Rabinowitz Films: 31 (2). Sil-Metropole: 56. Michael Sing- 21. Lonesome Rhodes real languages? Frankly, we were too im- er: 46. Courtesy Elliott Stein: 6. Toronto Festi- 22. Henry Spencer val of Festivals: 43 (1). Courtesy Amos Vogel: 23. Jim Stark pressed to check. Mr. L. wins a free year 62. World Wide/AP: 25, 30 (1,2,3,4,5,6.). 24. Sean Thomton 25. Clyde Miller Wynant ofthe magazine for Opus #28. -R.c. VIDEO ORIGINAL AUTOGRAPHED FINDERS CELEBRITY PHOTOS We locate and obtain any obscure or Hollywood legends, superstars. hard-to-find films on video tape. Quality collection, authenticity guaranteed. 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